Couture’s Age of Experience, Experience of Age

Chanel couture is in its 110th year. Giorgio Armani turns 91 on Friday. Weighty numbers which might seem like a bulwark against the sense of pell-mell change that is sweeping fashion at the moment, except, of course, Chanel welcomes a new designer in September (only the fourth in eleven decades). And, for the first time in the 20 years he has been showing his couture presentation in Paris, Armani didn’t make it to his new one, on the advice of his doctors in Milan.

So ultimately, time waits for no one. Change must come. But not just yet in the collections Chanel and Armani showed on Tuesday.

Chanel’s invitation was accompanied by a gold-covered tome (pre-stress your coffee table!) curated by close friend of the house Sofia Coppola and designed by the art world’s favourite art director Joseph Logan. Its cornucopia of visual riches celebrated those 110 years in spectacular style, but it couldn’t help but seem like a swansong to something, given the feverish expectation that new boy Matthieu Blazy is going to transform Chanel. And its 450 pages of memories also couldn’t help but cast a shadow over the last collection shown by the so-called Creation Studio, who’ve been holding the fort since Virginie Viard left a year ago. Sometimes, placeholders get to take a final bow. The audience at Monday morning’s show seemed to linger unusually, which made me wonder if that’s what they were waiting for. It didn’t happen, which was a shame, because I think the Creation Studio have done a perfectly serviceable job of sustaining fashion’s most famous legacy.

And, without damning the presentation with faint praise, that’s what they managed one last time.

Pastoral and understated were the words the house used to describe the collection. The mood was enhanced by barely-there makeup which burnished the models with a healthy glow. Their hair was pulled back in tight little no-nonsense knots. There was no jewellery. The footwear was chunky boots. A couple of the looks featured tweedy shifts that tied at the back. They could have been outdoorsy land girls and they made an odd contrast with the sophisticated backdrop of sweeping curtains, the huge walls of mirrors, the lounging sofas and bolsters, all designed to evoke the couture salons at 31 rue Cambon.

Gabrielle herself was an outdoorsy sort when she was in the English lowlands or the Scottish highlands with her various beaus. That was where she discovered the wonder of tweed. Here, Chanel’s tweeds were particularly rustic, thick and fuzzy with feathers and fringes. Cream and oatmeal dominated the colour palette (Scottish breakfast). The feathers also came in tippets and shrugs, creating big, hazy silhouettes, except for the white tulle peignoir floating over a voluminous white lace-and-feather skirt, where the tippet, crusted with jet beads, was like a black crow settling round the model’s shoulders.

The fuzziness blurred hems and cuffs in a tufty effect that was quite pleasing. It invited touch, which came across, in a curious way, as rather pagan. Every seat in the show space (a more intimate upstairs part of the usually very Grand Palais) sported a gilded ear of wheat, pagan symbol of abundance and fertility. Gabrielle thought that too. So there were wheaty golden chevrons embroidered into a jacket, some tweeds were gilded and the bride in virginal white carried a whole sheaf of wheat. You could take it all as a symbol of a new beginning. Not quite Wicker Man but -ish. And Mica Levi on the soundtrack scarcely dulled that stretch of the imagination.

Chanel Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 (gianluca carraro)

Giorgio Armani’s invitation to his Privé show included a perfume specially created for the occasion. Like the presentation, it was named Noir Séduisant, and it claimed to be “the olfactory equivalent of the elements that inspired the show.” The scent filled its brief. It was an olfactory TKO. Funny thing though, the show was undoubtedly noir from start to finish, but the séduisant went AWOL. What was clearly supposed to seduce the senses got sidetracked by the intensely cerebral nature of the clothes. Nothing says stark like black velvet cut to its core: the slimmest-line pants, the most reduced columns. Armani called them “lines of ink” in the written statement he sent from Milan to make up for his non-appearance. They were clothes to appreciate, rather than surrender to.

And of course you appreciate them as the creations of fashion’s lion in his last, long winter. Armani talked about “the iron focus and obsessive attention” with which he still controls everything, even though he wasn’t on the ground in Paris. But black can be particularly unforgiving, friend one day, foe the next. I can understand Armani’s defiance. That’s age. And, after all, purity is his strong suit. It was obvious here in the way that he illuminated the all-black with a single telling detail: a peplum, a huge bow at throat or waist, a clutch of coq feathers, panniers like beetle wings. But midnight blue is really Armani’s soft spot. His clothes have never been more elegant and sensual than when they reflect the inky night sky over North Africa. That’s his true Nuit Séduisante. Hit me one more time with that, GA.