What creatives can learn from Coco Chanel
Thoughts from a walk around the V&A's blockbuster exhibition.
I went to the Coco Chanel exhibition at the V&A yesterday. It’s the final weekend of the blockbuster show and the queue snaked round the block as if the whole world had descended upon South Kensington for it. Ahead of me in the queue was a woman who had come all the way from Chester that morning. An eighty-something Chanel fan behind us had only come from southwest London but was determined not to miss it. ‘It's going to Singapore next and I'm not going to be able to get there,’ she said, gritting her teeth to bed down in the queue.
We weren't going to give up either, I'd seen it before but I had been telling my mum for ages how brilliant it was and it was our Mother’s Day trip. Once inside, it was busy but still glorious. Display after display of chic dresses and chiffon gowns; most of them were nearly a hundred years old but looked so timeless and beautiful that they could be worn to tonight’s Oscars and be the star of the red carpet.
In the room devoted to suits my mum made an observation.
‘Look, they are basically the same. Every of them has a little twist that makes them unique but every suit is still hallmark Chanel.’
She was right. I worked for a fashion magazine for five years, and have long known that although there have been plenty of brands over the years doing ‘timeless classics’, anything from Chanel always stands out as being Chanel.
But I’d never given a great deal of thought to what actually made the signature Chanel look, and it was only as we moved from room to room, that I began to notice: it’s there in the details of the tailoring, the classic silhouette, the colour palette, the quality of the fabrics. Each detail simple, but each undeniably ‘Chanel’ . Coco understood the power of the ‘signature look’, and stuck to it.
As she famously said herself, ‘fashion fades, only style stays the same.’
The power of timeless can be felt throughout the creative industries. Vice, for one moment, the most fashionable media brand in the world, recently announced that it was closing down its website, whereas The New York Times - the venerable ‘Gray Lady’ remains the most prestigious broadsheet in the world. If you want to last, there’s nothing wrong with not being the hot, new shiny thing.
There were other things that the observant creative noticed at Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto.