EXCLUSIVE: Chanel to Unveil Cruise Collection in Monaco in May
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PARIS – Chanel is deepening its relationship with brand ambassador Charlotte Casiraghi, choosing her native Monaco as the destination for its cruise 2023 collection.
Creative director Virginie Viard will unveil the line on May 5 in the tiny principality, which is a byword for glamour and has served as a setting for movies including “To Catch a Thief” and “GoldenEye.” Barring any last-minute hitches, it will be the brand’s first cruise show with an audience since May 2019, when Viard made her debut.
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Chanel did not specify the venue for the show, but noted it presented its Métiers d’Art collection at the Monte-Carlo Opera House in 2006.
Casiraghi featured prominently in the French fashion house’s spring haute couture show, appearing in teaser images and a short film screened at the venue, and opening the show on horseback. The granddaughter of American film star Grace Kelly shot her first ad campaign for Chanel in Monaco, and also animates a bimonthly literary event that acts as a kind of super-chic book club for Chanel-ites.
In a statement, Chanel highlighted its longstanding ties to the area. Founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel had her villa La Pausa built in 1929 in nearby Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, overlooking Monaco, and the brand’s late creative director Karl Lagerfeld made La Vigie, another villa in the same town, his summer residence from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s.
La Vigie was also the location for Casiraghi’s wedding reception in 2019, for which she wore a white satin bustier dress from Chanel’s spring 2019 haute couture collection, the last designed by Lagerfeld.
“By choosing to present the 2022-23 cruise show in Monaco, Virginie Viard seals and prolongs Chanel’s ties with the principality. This relationship is perfectly embodied by Charlotte Casiraghi, ambassador and spokesperson for the house since 2021, president and founder of Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco and patron of the Jumping International de Monte-Carlo,” Chanel said.
Speaking to WWD ahead of the couture show, Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS, indicated that Casiraghi would continue to play an important role in the brand’s communications.
“It’s a very beautiful collaboration in every sense — intellectual, philosophical. There’s a real affinity between Charlotte and Virginie, and Charlotte and Chanel,” he said. “It’s a story that is always being rewritten.”
Lagerfeld, a close friend of Casiraghi’s mother, Princess Caroline of Monaco, also had a separate permanent residence in the principality, which recently hosted an auction of his estate.
While Lagerfeld was known for staging shows as far afield as Dubai, Singapore and Cuba, Viard has stuck closer to home, especially since the coronavirus pandemic has made international travel impossible for a whole section of clients and editors.
Chanel’s cruise 2022 collection was unveiled in Les Baux-de-Provence with only a smattering of VIP guests in attendance. The year before that, the brand canceled its planned show in Capri due to the coronavirus pandemic, and presented the collection through a video.
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