As the new Chanel Spring-Summer 2024 Ready-to-Wear collection just launched, the designs are an ode to liberty and to movement, telling a story that has its origins in the gardens of the villa Noailles.
A short distance from the sea, up in the hills of Hyères, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles’ modernist villa, designed by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in 1923, bathes in sunlight. Its many terraced gardens, surrounded by bays through which the landscape is cut into just as many images, offer an idyllic freedom.
Facing south, the villa’s volumes and outdoor spaces – from its cubist chequered garden to its sunken flower beds – light up the Spring-Summer 2024 Ready-to-Wear collection with an intense vitality. The exhilaration of light and colour, the profusion of geometric patterns, the play of contrasting asymmetries, patchworks, lines, checks and stripes give rhythm to a collection that sets out its own idea of elegance and insouciance, components of the allure so dear to the artistic director of Chanel’s fashion collections.
There are dressing gowns in multicoloured, black or pink tweed, and jackets in striped terrycloth of every colour. Suits in neoprene, dresses and trousers in lace are adorned with floral motifs. This joie de vivre extends to short dresses and a top in sunray pleats, striped Bermuda shorts, and doublebreasted jackets worn open with hands in pockets.
“Sophistication and informality, the tweed throughout the collection, sportswear and lace: I tried to bring one thing and its opposite together in the coolest way possible. And the gardens and swimming pool of the villa Noailles, that exceptional setting, lend themselves to that rather well.”
Bathing suits, organza babydolls, sportswear and evening dresses all take the same sun-kissed path.
Here, clothes are liberated from constraint and emancipated from structure. Waists are low, heels are flat. Suits are lightweight and very supple: no epaulettes, no lining. Gilet-jackets, cardigans worn like dresses with a sense of freedom, trousers with pockets, wide leg shorts and asymmetrical skirts, bows and pleats complete this study of life in motion. A certain idea of sensuality permeates the pieces – dresses, shirts, petticoats, bra tops – in black organza, whose transparency permits endless layering.
References to Marie-Laure de Noailles and Gabrielle Chanel, united by their strength of character and friendships with the artistic avant-garde, come together in the black sunglasses adorned with gold chains.
