Review of Chanel Fall 2023 Couture Fashion Show
Strolling by the Seine
By Mark Wittmer
Staged along the banks of the Seine, with some of its walkway’s bricks quaintly painted pink and the Eiffel tower peeking up from the background, Chanel’s Fall 2023 couture show was a simple and bright celebration of the brand’s core foundation.
The looks on display here are a familiar sight – floral dresses, double-breasted coats, and tweed sets – but executed with a focused freshness.
Referencing the classic motifs of still-life painting, flowers and fruits blossom and grow across the collection, brought to life by the house’s stable of ateliers. But the collection itself, especially as bolstered by its staging and styling – models carry baskets of flowers as if they’ve picked them up from a local vendor, and one walks a dog – feels created with real life in mind. Since the beginning, Chanel’s couture practice has always been about making wearable clothing for women, and (though today it still fulfills couture’s main function of being an ad for the brands’ more accessible products) Virginie Viard is faithfully, quietly continuing this approach.
In a way one could actually justifiably complain that the collection looks too much like ready-to-wear (or perhaps the house’s yearly, craft-focused métier d’art show): these are the same silhouettes we’ve seen time and time again on Virginie Viard’s runways, just with more intricate artisanal surface details.
But then the Chanel couture customer – shadowy, wealthy, and powerful as she may be – is in touch with the house’s elegant design-for-life approach, of getting dressed up to walk along the Seine.
Sensitive and sophisticated, the couture collection is another unmistakable iteration of Chanel’s signature vision for bold and elegant Parisian dressing.