Chanel Spring 2021 Couture Collection

This season, Chanel’s creative director Virginie Viard was hearing wedding bells on the rue Cambon—not her own, she’s been happily partnered to composer Jean-Marc Fyot, the man she describes as “my fiance,” for a quarter of a century—but instead the bells ringing for a marriage party composed of her haute couture cabine, some 32 models in all. 

These are not, as Viard says, the conventional fancy nuptials one might expect from a Parisian couture collection, but instead “more bohemian style—more a wedding or a family celebration in a village than at the Ritz!” complete with “the mother and the aunt, [and] the 15-year-old girl dressing up for the first time”—the latter in a tiny little grown-up black dress of spangled black tulle worn with 1980s opaque white tights. 

There are also boys at this wedding, or rather girls who, in Viard’s words, are “a little garçonne” and dressed in old fashioned boys’ clothes—tweedy Oxford bags, and waistcoats for instance, a reminder of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s appropriations of menswear in her designs, and her literal borrowing from the wardrobes of her lovers including Boy Capel and the Duke of Westminster. The mother of the bride, meanwhile, has some chic little suits in silvery embroidery and lace to choose from, or a skinny shrunken cardigan jacket embroidered by Vernoux, while more adventurous guests might opt for a lace jumpsuit or a tiny tweed coat dress with a ruffled overskirt to tie on like an apron. There are “a lot of flounces and petticoats,” says Viard, as though the Gypsy Kings were playing at the celebration and the guests in those big tulle skirts were going to spin around the town square. “There is a masculine/feminine side to the silhouettes,” she adds, and the fairy-tale grandeur of these pale net ballgowns is brought into the real world when those skirts are paired with white boyfriend shirts, or singlets of crocheted chiffon, worked by the embroidery house of Montex.

To set the scene, the Grand Palais has been transformed this season to evoke the charm of a country wedding in the South of France (the sunshine bright enough for the guests to wear Jacqueline Onassis–scale sunglasses), with rustic arches wrapped in flowers, wooden chairs for the socially distanced guests, and coronets of silk as well as real flowers in the hair—the first time, as far as Viard knows, that Lemarié, fabled for their exquisite artificial flowers, have also worked with the real McCoy.