LONDON — Chanel feted the opening of “Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto” at the Victoria and Albert Museum with a series of events ahead of London Fashion Week, which kicks off Friday.
Friends and ambassadors of Chanel — including Naomi Campbell, Keira Knightley, Hio Miyazawa, Simone Ashley, Laura Bailey, Amanda Harlech, Clémence Poésy, Georgia May Jagger, Alexa Chung, Jenna Coleman, Clara Rugaard and Amita Suman — were invited to dine alongside key editors and patrons of the V&A at the Raphael Cartoons on Tuesday night following an exclusive preview of the first U.K. exhibition dedicated entirely to the French fashion designer. The dinner was followed by a performance by Griff.
Related Articles
Miyazawa, an actor and Chanel brand ambassador from Japan, was amazed at the scale of the V&A version as it was considerably larger than the one at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo last year.
You May Also Like
“What’s nice about the Tokyo exhibition is that it was compact and very close to all the items, and I did the narration for the audio tour. Here, it’s nice to really get to know the connections between Gabrielle Chanel and the U.K. We didn’t know about that part in Japan,” said Miyazawa, who has had three film projects coming out this year. He plays the lead character in two of them, “Egoist” and “Spring in Between.”
Actress Aiysha Hart, who is set to appear alongside Anthony Mackie in Rupert Wyatt’s “Desert Warrior,” an action-packed epic feature set in 7th Century Arabia, said she adored the final room, where the mirror stairs in Chanel’s Rue Cambon haute couture salons were recreated to some of her finest eveningwear designers.
Greta Bellamacina, an English actress who starred in the indie film “Commedia,” said she enjoyed “looking back at some of the pieces from over 100 years ago and seeing how modern they are, and how daring some of the pieces were at the time. Almost a hundred years later, they still look modern and are totally wearable.”
She is also a fan of the suit room, where 54 Chanel tweed suits are on display on a curved wall with two levels.
Ballet dancer and actress Francesca Hayward, who played Victoria in Tom Hooper’s “Cats” and Juliet in the 2019 film “Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words,” said she was particularly interested in the original costumes on display from “Le Train Bleu” designed by Chanel. The one-act ballet made its U.K. debut at the Coliseum Theatre London in 1924 and starred Lydia Sokolova, Anton Dolin, Bronislava Nijinska and Leon Woizikowsky.
“I just love how classic it is from the very first outfit in the exhibition to the very last in chronological order. You can tell that if you wore that you’d feel incredible. I think I need to come back for more,” Hayward added.
Charting six decades of her career, starting with the opening of her first millinery boutique in Paris in 1910, and ending with her final show in 1971, the exhibition opens to the public Saturday and runs until Feb. 25 at the museum’s Sainsbury Gallery.
Tickets for the exhibition cost 24 pounds, while the exhibition is free for V&A members.