LA VIE DE VIRGINIE

Virginie Viard, the quiet, creative force behind a stealthy reimagining of Chanel, may be a woman of few words, but she doesn’t mince them. Her conversation, as her friend the model and music producer Caroline de Maigret says, “is the opposite of small talk. She doesn’t know how to fake it.”

Viard vividly remembers her first Chanel show, a campy Karl Lagerfeld haute couture extravaganza staged in the late 1980s that she was taken to as a treat by the father of a family friend. The collection was all hats and gloves and models, including Inès de la Fressange and Marpessa Hennink, vamping for the runway photographers. What did Viard make of the collection? “Horrible!” she says now, matter-of-factly. “So old.”

Viard’s trajectory has taken her from Lagerfeld’s invaluable Chanel studio director – he famously described her as “my right arm … and my left arm” – to, following his death in February 2019, the creative director for the brand, in a transition of such seamless elegance that it might have been constructed in the house’s fabled haute couture workrooms. If fashion’s chattering classes were expecting the famously private Wertheimer family, who own Chanel, to install another bold-face name to replace Lagerfeld, there were plenty of clues to indicate that they would opt for continuity and reward experience and expertise instead – not least that Lagerfeld himself brought Viard, who had worked for him since 1987, out to share the applause at the last two collections where he took a bow.

Standing in the long shadows cast by Lagerfeld and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel – two of the most formidable creative forces of the 20th and 21st centuries – Viard, 58, who might be the least famous designer in fashion at its most famous house, is shy and almost self-effacing in comparison. “She’s action versus talk,” says the actress and Chanel brand ambassador Kristen Stewart, who adds that Viard “embraces otherness – she herself is quite strange in a beautiful