Chanel Takes Its Métiers d’Art Show to Hangzhou’s West Lake

Chanel presented its Métiers d’art 2024/25 collection on 3 December 2024 on West Lake in Hangzhou, on wooden walkways laid just above the surface of the water, at dusk. The lake, with its causeways, pagodas and willow-lined shores, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the most celebrated landscapes in Chinese culture.

The choice of place was not arbitrary. Gabrielle Chanel collected Coromandel screens, the large lacquered folding screens made in China from the 17th century, and owned 32 of them. The largest, which still stands in her apartment above the boutique on Rue Cambon in Paris, shows West Lake. She never travelled to China; the show took the collection to the landscape she had looked at every day.

The Métiers d’art collection is presented each December in a different city and is conceived to show the work of the specialist workshops that Chanel has acquired over the years: embroiderers, feather workers, pleaters, milliners, goldsmiths and bootmakers. In Hangzhou the references to the screens were direct, in black coats lined and trimmed with gold, in lacquer-like finishes and in camellias, a flower the founder knew from Chinese art, embroidered by the house of Lesage. Tweed jackets appeared in many versions, and the theme of travel ran through the styling.

The collection was designed by the house’s studio, six months after the departure of creative director Virginie Viard and shortly before the appointment of her successor. A short film by Wim Wenders, with Tilda Swinton travelling in imagination from Rue Cambon to the lake, accompanied the show, alongside the Chinese ambassadors of the house, Xin Zhilei and Leah Dou.

For Hangzhou, the evening was a moment of international attention of a kind the city has sought, as new hotels arrive, among them the second Four Seasons and the planned Rosewood. For travellers, it was a reminder of what the lake has meant for centuries.