“It is radically unexpected. Truly extraordinary. Genuinely off the wall. It is so superincongruous that it’s weirdly interesting.”
The renowned designer Peter Saville, speaking to the Guardian a few hours before Chanel’s catwalk show, painted quite the picture of the “dynamically unusual” state visit by the most august and courtly of Parisian fashion houses to the rainy streets of Manchester.
A front row that ran past the tattoo parlours, pubs and karaoke bars of the Northern Quarter brought together Tilda Swinton with Gary Neville, and Hugh Grant with John Cooper Clarke. On the street catwalk, the bodice of a cocktail dress was hand-embroidered in concentric circles of jet beads to look like the liquorice-black grooves on a vinyl record, while intarsia cashmere sweaters were plastered in graphics inspired by nightclub flyers. The invitation to the show was a montage of images from Mancunian counter-culture: Saville’s designs for Factory Records; Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette, marching with her daughters; the striped walls of the Hacienda; images of the old Granada studios – soon to reopen as the first Manchester outpost of Soho House – and Kevin Cummins’s 1979 photograph of Joy Division on Hulme Bridge.
