Charlotte Casiraghi Shows Off Her Equestrian Skills on the Chanel Runway

Monaco’s Charlotte Casiraghi is well known as an equestrian and as a committed ambassador for Chanel, but until this week, she has never gotten an opportunity to combine those two roles on a large scale. On Tuesday, Casiraghi opened the French brand’s Spring/Summer haute couture show on the back of a horse, dressed in a black tweed jacket with jeweled buttons from the collection and a flick of dramatic winged eyeliner.

In front of a Paris Fashion Week crowd that included Pharrell Williams and Margot Robbie, Casiraghi trotted down the runway at the beginning of a show that included riffs on the house’s classic tweed suiting, sheer fabrics, and a few eye-catching patterns, all designed by Virginie Viard, the longtime Chanel designer who took over as creative director after the 2019 death of Karl Lagerfeld. 

The show staging was designed by visual artist Xavier Veilhan, who often includes horse motifs in his work, and also included inflatable toys and elements of a mini-golf course. In their show notes, Chanel described it as “part landscape, part garden and part open theatre stage,” and said that the seating for attendees was incorporated into the stage. Veilhan also shot a video to accompany the show, and it features Charlotte riding through a fantastical equestrian park to music composed by musician Sébastian Tellier.

Casiraghi’s connection to the brand goes back decades. Her mother, Princess Caroline of Monaco, was a close friend of Lagerfeld, and in 2019, she wore a Chanel gown—with a few nods to her late grandmother, Grace Kelly—when she married film producer Dimitri Rassam. In 2020, she became an official ambassador for the brand. “My contribution is being not just a muse, but someone who transmits,” she said in a statement when the brand announced her role. “Today’s fashion has this strength of expression, and it can move culture forward.”

Casiraghi has been competing in equestrian sports since she was a teenager, and she now serves as a patron for the Longines Global Champions Tour, a show-jumping competition that she competed in for years.

“Competing in show jumping is a school of life,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2013. “And it’s one of the few Olympic sports where men and women are equal. Being a great horseman does not rely on physical strength but more on the mind and sensibility.”

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