Last night, as dusk fell on Hangzhou, China, lights illuminated a runway weaving through West Lake, a poetic counterpart to the booming tech capital’s momentum. The body of water and the rolling hills around it were playing host to what has now become a cult rendezvous in the fashion calendar: Chanel’s annual Métiers d’art show.
Among the lakeside temples and pagodas, guests settled in for a commemoration of the culture and creativity that served as a plentiful font of inspiration for the French house’s founder. Though Gabrielle Chanel never ventured to China or West Lake during her lifetime, the landscape took on a life of its own in her iconic Parisian apartment through her collection of coromandel screens, which depicted scenes taking place around the body of water. Those images wove their way through manifold Chanel collections in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ahead of the show, legendary German director Wim Wenders—accompanied by house ambassadors Tilda Swinton, Leah Dou, and Xin Zhilei—transformed one of Mademoiselle Chanel’s screens into a portal between Paris and Hangzhou in a short film, produced to accompany the new collection. “I will be in Hangzhou tomorrow,” Swinton declares as the screen opens up, transporting the viewer from Chanel’s rue Cambon abode to the sunny lakeside expanse.
The 2024/25 Métiers d’art collection—a feat of the legacy house’s Maisons d’art, which are based out of its Parisian design hub le19M—takes this sense of fantasy and runs with it. Embracing the inherent dichotomies of winter travel, outerwear, knits, bags, and boots ran the show. Beanies and scarves punctuated silhouettes alongside Mademoiselle Chanel’s favorite mid-calf footwear—provided by Massaro. Coats ranged from long shouldered to tuxedo. Models strutted by wearing them oversized, belted, and buttoned at the sides in satin, tweed, and velvet. More somber seasonal tones were animated with bursts of pastels and floral embroidery by Lesage. And alongside a prevalence of silk, depictions of lotus flowers and fruit—an homage to the flowering trees of ancient China—made the show location’s resounding influence on the new line evident.
East and West, night and day, then and now: the new collection was an exercise in contradiction and an ode to the people who walk those lines—and the clothes they wear while doing it.
