Chanel's House’s Fall/ Winter 2023 collection is a floralscape that celebrates its intrinsic beauty

When it comes to Chanel, pearls and tweed are a given, but over the years it’s the reimagined versions of these key elements that makes each collection worth pining over. Helmed by the camellia flower, the Fall/Winter collection this year embodies the flower not only as a motif but also as an icon. “The camellia is more than a theme, it is an eternal code of the house,” explains creative director, Virginie Viard with a smile. While the show notes cued ‘delicate in motion’, it was so much more. The silhouettes followed a bent etched with camellias that were appliquéd onto long pants, traced in feathers on knits, and could be found hiding in floral prints. Holding the camellia as the north star of its collection, Virginie says, “I find it reassuring and familiar, I like its softness and its strength”. 

The mood was set at Paris’s Grand Palais Éphémère where two larger-than-life camellias anchored two loops that came to life as amphitheatre-style seating, together they created an infinite loop of this season’s fashion spectacle. Ushering in a flurry of asymmetrical coats, slit dresses, Bermuda shorts suits, flounced separates, revealing backs, beads and sequins, fantasy threads in knitwear, all carrying the momentum of the collection. Even the short film for the collection, shot by the photographers Inez and Vinoodh, featured Japanese actress Nana Komatsu as a Polly Maggoo type. In a mysterious play of shadows and contrasts tinged with surrealism, the grace of her gestures and the delicacy of her face resonate with the elegance of the House’s emblematic flower.