By Sylvia Haghjoo

I still remember how I was sitting in the CHANEL office in Hamburg a couple of years ago having a beautiful conversation, at that time everything was uncertain and at the same time the beginning of a very local and beautiful growing friendship. Along side my and Julia’s journey we have not only collected many memories close to our hearts, but also have met very humble and passionate souls who not only stand behind the house, but also for the house and whom because friends and family to us.

It was Paris, the 3rd of March 2020 an exciting morning for me and Julia at the Grand Palais, and the reveal of the fall/winter20 ready-to-wear collection of french fashion house CHANEL. The poetry unforced, woman-friendly, pieces that embrace the house codes and at the same time they reinforce Virginie Viard’s own pragmatic instincts for comfortable and insouciant glamour. Virginie took her inspiration from a turn-of-the 1980s photograph of Karl Lagerfeld and his sometime muse Anna Piaggi, both dressed in the height of Edwardian-revival finery. In that image, Piaggi is shrouded in a veiled Death in Venice hat, and Lagerfeld wears a morning-dress-stripe jacket and vest, a floppy black silk cravat, jodhpurs, and a pair of sturdy riding boots—an image that for Viard represents “strong romance.” Viard reinterpreted Lagerfeld’s chunky-heel boot and styled it persuasively with every single outfit in the 72-look collection (a tight edit by house standards), from a thickly knit cardigan worn with a cropped white cotton evening dickey and micro shorts to liquid black velvet evening gowns. (There were also a plethora of riding-stock cravats but only one black velvet riding hat.) Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s passion for horse racing apparently began with her romance with the dashing polo player Boy Capel, and eventually she owned racehorses herself.

A strong effortless romance and understated elegance for fall/winter 20 without any flourishes. It was a morning of dreams, a walk on clouds and a never ending crave of breezy, long hair in a stylization so at ease as the looks itself.