Ch-Ch-Changes

With nonstop job upheaval and zero focus, Heritage Luxury is in a full-blown existential crisis. But fashion's emerging designers can see the future, and it's cool, modern, and green-minded.

You know Heritage Luxury—the old-time household name brands that ring up $5 billion to $20 billion a year in sales—is in trouble when one of its leaders, Chanel, hasn’t had a designer for six months, and despite that, produces its best show in years.

On Tuesday at the Grand Palais, the enormous Belle Époque event space recently restored by the French government with substantial financial help from Chanel—as I detailed in an Architectural Digest story here—the century-old fashion house presented its Spring-Summer 2025 collection, designed by the anonymous in-house team.

“When you allow yourself to have waste, you don’t see the possibilities of the small things,” said Hodakova designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson.

As you may recall, and I reported here last spring, Chanel’s last creative director, Virginie Viard, a former Karl Lagerfeld assistant and one of his heirs, abruptly quit, apparently after being presented with a drawn-out transition plan that would replace her with a big name talent. With the Lagerfeld estate payday around the corner, Viard had the financial might to quote Johnny Paycheck to her boss, fashion division president Bruno Pavlovsky, though I’m sure it sounded far more elegant in French.

In the center of the Grand Palais on Tuesday stood a two-story bird cage, and on each chair there was a card with a quote from Coco Chanel:

“People have always wanted to put me in a cage.”

While the studio team translated that quote literally, decorating much of the collection with feathers, and, for the finale, the show directors had Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keogh hop on the cage’s giant swing and sing Prince’s When Doves Cry—a nod to a early 1990s Coco perfume campaign starring teenage Vanessa Paradis, which, crazily, I wrote about for The Washington Post back then—the unspoken message was clear:

In the last three decades, Heritage Luxury brands have corporatized and globalized to the point that they are now trapped in a gigantic gilded cage, unable to do anything radical, or even slightly daring, in fear that their sales—and stock—will plummet.