Chanel heading south to Provence for next Cruise show

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jan 12, 2021

Chanel is heading south to Provence for its next Cruise show, when the fashion house will unveil its 2022 resort collection in the Carrières de Lumières in Les Baux-de-Provence, France, on May 4.

Given that this month’s haute couture season in Paris is a digital-only season, Chanel currently plans to unveil a film of its next couture collection on Tuesday, Jan. 26. As many observers predict that the next French ready-to-wear season in the first week of March may also be purely online due to the continuing lockdown in Western Europe, and snail’s pace of the rollout of vaccines in France, this Cruise show may well turn out to be Chanel’s next catwalk show before an actual live audience.

Almost two years ago, Virginie Viard marked her runway debut as a solo designer for Chanel with her first Cruise collection for the house in May 2019, when she showed inside the Grand Palais with a mock Beaux-Arts style train station. The house was forced to cancel her second Cruise show, planned for Capri last May, and instead presented a video of models at play inside a pretend-hotel in the Bay of Naples that was actually a Paris film studio.

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A giant white-stone quarry, the Carrières de Lumières is often used as an exhibition space where giant light shows are projected on its immense galleries. Back in 1959, multi-disciplinary artist and friend of Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, stunned by the majestic beauty of the Carrières de Lumières, shot Le Testament d’Orphée inside the quarry in Les Baux-de-Provence. A rocky medieval outcrop topped by a ruined castle, Les Baux-de-Provence is often named one of France’s most beautiful villages, and even boasts the remains of human habitation dating back 6,000 years.

For the past two decades the quarry has also housed a Cathedral of Images, when enormous photo displays are project onto the smooth walls. In 2009, a Picasso program attracted over 250,000 visitors.

Viard’s legendary predecessor Karl Lagerfeld was famous for taking Chanel catwalk shows on world tours – ranging around the planet with stops in Dubai, Edinburgh, Singapore and Havana. However the current creative director sticks far closer to home. Her one foray outside of Paris was in December, when she showed the Métiers d’Art collection inside the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, with just one person in the audience, a house ambassador, Kristen Stewart.