It has been five months since Virginie Viard exited Chanel, and it will be longer still until the brand names its next creative lead. Could Hedi Slimane – the man whose rakish and rake-thin cut at Dior Homme once encouraged the late Karl Lagerfeld to go on a crash diet in the early 2000s – take up the mantle? Is Jeremy Scott – who Lagerfeld once described as the “only person” who could follow in his footsteps – house hunting in Paris for a reason? Or will Simon Porte Jacquemus – who has been spied on several occasions at the Chanel headquarters – find himself the logical heir to the designer’s poptimism?
It’s times like these when Chanel’s most famous clotheshorses take on an almost diplomatic role, functioning not as living advertisements for the brand, but as a rock and stable, as ambassadors in the truest sense of the term. People like Jennie Kim and Penélope Cruz, who last night attended the second showing of Chanel’s Cruise 2025 presentation in Hong Kong. The actor was photographed in a feather-trimmed tweed jacket and a coordinating miniskirt with platform Mary Janes – calling to mind her catwalk debut at Lagerfeld’s swansong in 2019 – alongside the Belgian musician Angèle and model Caroline de Maigret.
Chanel is in no rush to announce a replacement, but Viard is continuing to shape the brand’s vision. Lagerfeld’s former right hand hired the Marseille-based dance troupe La Horde to direct the original Cruise show at Le Corbusier’s emblematic Cité Radieuse this spring, and its choreographers were once again behind yesterday evening’s reboot at the Hong Kong Design Institute. An international rerun compounded what critic Sarah Mower wrote of the show’s first iteration. It showed, she said, “Chanel as a cultural patron, playing the role of a quasi-national ambassador for modern French society; Chanel as part of the fabric of everyday contemporary life, with a wardrobe to match.” Succession rumours will continue to swirl in Viard’s absence, but there is, for now, a power struggle of an entirely different kind to centre focus on.
