Who is Virginie Viard, Chanel’s New Head Designer After Karl Lagerfeld’s Death?

• Virginia Viard, who will succeed Karl Lagerfeld at the helm of Chanel, has worked with the iconic designer for three decades.
• She is currently the brand’s fashion studio director.
• Lagerfeld once described her as “my right hand and my left hand. Our relationship is essential, doubled by a very real friendship and affection.”

It stands to argue that after his astonishing, paradigm-shifting, 36-year career at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld’s name and image is as world famous and synonymous with the house as Coco Chanel herself. With his death today at age 85 comes the end of a very long, extraordinarily prosperous era for Chanel—and the beginning of the new one.

It’s hard to imagine Chanel without him at the helm, but were Karl here to deliver one of his signature aphorisms, he surely would have been the first to stress the importance of moving on, especially when it involves nearly $10 billion in annual sales.

To that end, Chanel has already named Lagerfeld’s successor: Virginie Viard, the director of Chanel’s fashion studio, with whom he worked closely for more than 30 years. By wasting no time making Viard’s new role official, Chanel put a quick end to the fiendish guessing game of who’s on next that fashion routinely delights in. At least for now.

Who is Virginie Viard

She joined Chanel in 1987 as an intern in haute-couture embroidery and went on to become Lagerfeld’s right hand, responsible for eight fashion collections a year, including ready-to-wear, cruise, Métiers d’Art and couture. Lagerfeld considered Viard one of the four people who ran Chanel’s fashion behemoth, including himself, Bruno Pavlovsky, president of Chanel fashion, and Eric Pfrunder, image director.

Virginie Viard and model Vittoria Ceretti pose on the runway during the Chanel Spring Summer 2019 show on January 22, 2019 in Paris.

Peter White

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While Viard’s importance to Lagerfeld and Chanel has been well known internally and among industry insiders, her influence has been mostly behind the scenes. Hints that she was tipped as the front runner to succeed Lagerfeld emerged when the two took the traditional runway bow together in recent seasons, including spring 2019 at the Grand Palais and December’s Metiers d’Art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Last month during the haute couture in Paris, Viard emerged from backstage without Lagerfeld to acknowledge the crowd at the end of the show. The house issued a statement explaining that Lagerfeld “was feeling tired” and asked her to represent him.

Chanel Values Consistency and Loyalty

The decision to elect Viard to succeed Lagerfeld is not a hasty one, indicative of values on which Chanel has been unwavering for the past 36 years: consistency and loyalty. After all, the last big name designer it hired was Lagerfeld, who had a lifetime contract with the house.

Amanda Harlech, Karl Lagerfeld and Virginie Viard in 2003.

Djamilla Rosa Cochran

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Despite all this, succession rumors have swirled from time to time as Lagerfeld aged, with bets being placed on names such as Alber Elbaz, Haider Ackerman, and Hedi Slimane, whose work Lagerfeld famously patronized for his personal wardrobe, losing 90 pounds at one point to fit into Slimane’s skinny suits. In 2017 Chanel publicly shut down rumblings of a Slimane hire. At the moment, Slimane’s busy with Celine anyway.

As for other contenders, in a 2005 interview with New York magazine, Marc Jacobs, then creative director of Louis Vuitton and his own collection, went on the record saying that Chanel would be the only other job that interested him. “If there’s anything that tickles me behind the ear every once in a while, that’s it. That’s the only, the ultimate, thing,” he said.

Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld attend the LVMH Prize 2016 Young Fashion Designer at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Bertrand Rindoff Petroff

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Much has changed in the 14 years since, but onlookers could be forgiven for reading a couture-level audition in Jacobs’ stunning fall 2019 collection, shown last week in New York. Then there’s Phoebe Philo. Her ardent fan-base has practically formed a lobby for her return to design, perhaps on the Grand Palais stage, since she parted ways with Celine in 2017. Pavlovsky addressed that movement in December with Business of Fashion. “I hear the rumors [about Philo] and all that, and I find that quite funny,” he said. “But it’s nothing serious.”

What is serious is the business of Chanel. Just how serious was made public for the first time in the brand’s 108-year history last June when the company made the unprecedented move of publishing its annual results. The figures were staggering: $9.62 billion in sales for 2017 with 11 percent growth from the previous year and operating profits of $2.69 billion. A giant in the luxury sector, the company also has the luxury of being privately-owned by brothers Alain and Gérard Wertheimer. Without shareholders to please, they are free to do as they see fit.

Remembering Karl Lagerfeld’s Life in Photos

Releasing Chanel’s results last summer in tandem with the creation of a new, London-based holding company, Chanel Limited, indicated that the Wertheimers were gearing up for change. Whether that will go on to include the naming of a new, star designer remains to be seen.

Lagerfeld’s death comes at a challenged time for the fashion industry at large, one when bets on diva designers are increasingly off. (See the swift demise of Raf Simons at Calvin Klein.) Here’s betting that Viard will steward Chanel for at least the next few seasons. She knows what Chanel’s clients want to spend their collective $10 billion on.

Jessica Iredale is a fashion critic and a 15-year veteran of Women’s Wear Daily.

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