At Paris Fashion Week, designers audition for Chanel

By Rachel Tashjian / The Washington Post

PARIS, France — How do you interview for one job when you’ve already got another?

In the real world, you say you’ve got a doctor’s appointment, a family emergency. You take a personal day.

But in fashion, which has about as much in common with the real world as a high-heel shoe has with a blanket, you design the clothes you’d make if you were somewhere else.

It’s a bit like taking your current paramour out and cooking your crush’s favorite meal, then Instagramming it: See how this beef bourguignon would look coming from my kitchen?

The season of shows that wrapped up in Paris on Oct. 1 was like a slew of boyfriends churning out their best dishes. The love interest in question is the top post at Chanel, which has been without a designer since the departure of the late Karl Lagerfeld’s right hand, Virginie Viard, earlier this year.

The names of Hedi Slimane, Simon Porte Jacquemus, Hermès’s Nadège Vanhee, former Valentino designer Pierpaolo Piccioli and Marc Jacobs have all been bandied about the gossip sheets, with no clear leader emerging. This is without a doubt the plummiest, most influential role available to a designer today.

So you couldn’t help but see tweed clothes or a tasteful bag at a show and think: Is this designer making a play?

No one seemed to make a bolder overture than Celine’s Slimane — a point of view only slightly exaggerated by a sudden shake-up announced Oct. 2. The LVMH-owned brand stated that Slimane, since January 2018 the artistic, creative and image director of the house, was departing.

Less than three hours later, the label sent another release announcing that Michael Rider, the former creative director at Polo Ralph Lauren (and an American), would succeed him, starting early next year.

Rumors about this change-up had circulated throughout the summer, and although a twinned announcement isn’t unprecedented, In 2022, Burberry announced that its creative lead, Riccardo Tisci, was departing and, less than 48 hours later, that Daniel Lee, the British designer who made a mysterious exit from Bottega Veneta just a year prior, would replace him.

Generally, houses will announce the departure of one designer, then take several months to lay out its next moves. (Givenchy, which recently hired Alexander McQueen’s former steward Sarah Burton, took nearly a year to crown her the successor to Matthew Williams.)

This is true even if the top brass already has its pick in mind: There are non-competes to juggle and contract details, such as whether a designer will just make clothes or also oversee the advertising imagery and marketing strategy, to hammer out.

Whether this was a Chanel audition — or a kiss-off to the sweetheart who didn’t appreciate the superiority of your interpretation of rich Burgundian cuisine — you better hope that Slimane is headed somewhere else, and not to retirement. This was one of his finest outings at Celine: light, seductive and just plain cool.

Slimane is remarkably elusive. He rarely grants interviews and had not staged a live runway show since January 2023. But he has a special talent for making news, and at first it seemed he was just batting a condescending eyelash at Alessandro Michele, who made a wildly anticipated debut runway show at Valentino the same day he released his video.

Even before the Celine scoops, though, editors, stylists and other showgoers were talking about the collection as Chanel-but-not. Slimane, who has also worked for Dior and Saint Laurent, has a special talent for zeroing in on one specific period of a designer’s tenure and plundering it for years on end. The clothing may look only a bit different season to season, but if you get Slimane, you see the man never seems to run out of ideas.

And a lot of customers do, indeed, seem to get Slimane: He nearly doubled Celine’s business, reportedly to something near 2.5 billion euros (about $2.7 billion).

Here, he seemed to seize on the early 1960s, when Coco Chanel was solidifying herself into a global icon by distilling her designs into a uniform, primarily the tweed skirt suit. His little skirt suits, with a scarf knotted at the neck and good jewelry pinned on the chest, recalled those crisp moments of the 1960s when the conservatism of 1950s fashion was blending with a bit of youthful loucheness, which Slimane integrated with slightly naughty pairings, such as a pale-pink paillette twin set worn with a snakeskin skirt and gobs of long gold necklaces.

But this was no tribute collection; the empire-waist evening dresses and gowns, or a fringed black-and-white minidress, somehow looked extraordinarily contemporary, even though Slimane’s inspirations were rereading the literature of Françoise Sagan and listening to the Velvet Underground.

His designs are so uncompromisingly straightforward, so exacting, even ruthless, that they never look retro. You can see a woman (young or not) wearing one of those suits while having dinner at some messy, expensive restaurant with her friends, or going to the office, or taking the subway  — and catching your attention not for her eccentricity, but her polish.

Of course, there’s no word from Chanel, and maybe more importantly, Slimane has been moving in his sugared but pulled-together direction for a while now.

And, after all, Slimane wasn’t the only designer serving up a delicious tweedy dish. If there was a big trend this season, it was: “Well, I could design Chanel.” Coco Chanel is one of the most influential designers of all time: Men’s tweeds for women’s clothes, corset-free suiting, the little black dress and even the it-bag are all her invention. But designers seemed to be digging into her legacy with a studied eye.

There was Japanese designer Chitose Abe, of Sacai, whose once broad and tent-like silhouettes now look unusually lean, like Coco Chanel’s early modernist ensembles that freed women from corsets and expansive, heavy clothes. Abe, who lives in Japan, also just opened at atelier in Paris.

Then there was The Row. Did its subdued clothes, such as knit T-shirts and carpenter pants, look like a modern take on Chanel’s 1920s philosophy of chic humility, which said plainness was much more beautiful than ornamented clothes?

And just what was up with all those tweed jackets at Nicolas Ghesquière’s magnificent Louis Vuitton show — one of his most energized and dazzlingly crafted, with Hieronymus Bosch-esque T-shirts slung over ropes of spangles? Wouldn’t it be fun to see that on a Chanel couture runway?

Funnily enough, the studio-designed Chanel collection was pluckier than almost everything shown when Viard was in charge, from 2019 to earlier this year. The clothes flopped (in a good way) and floated (including the sunglasses, which were feathered), and Riley Keough (you know, Elvis’s granddaughter) sat on a swing in an enormous birdcage and belted out a Prince cover.

The clients, dazzling parrots of luxury in green Chanel skirt suits with yellow Chanel bags, happily took videos and grinned like devotees at the altar of their cult. I wondered whether women spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or more at Chanel even care who the designer behind those Double C’s is, so addicted are they to the brand’s tantalizing handbags and suits.

I posed this question to a veteran fashion stylist. “But they look so cheap now,” she countered. “A real designer is going to make things more sophisticated.”

Who that real designer will be remains an open question, with too many possible answers. But who can really do it? Now that’s a much narrower field.