Paris fashion has spoken: get ready for the year of the tutu skirt.
Chanel has thrown its might behind 2024’s first breakout look, with tulle dancers’ skirts the stars of the haute couture catwalk. Days after the tutu worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in the title sequence of Sex and the City sold for $52,000 (£41,000) in Los Angeles – outstripping the estimate of $8,000-$12,000 expected by auction house Julien’s – Chanel has confirmed ballet as fashion’s new obsession.
It takes a lot to upstage the revered Chanel tweed jacket, but tutu skirts – some just a wisp of translucent white, some with enough frothy pink lace to fill a bubble bath, others dotted with tiny silk bows – were centre stage at the Chanel show.
Margaret Qualley, who trained as a ballerina before becoming an actor, led a line of models who wore white ballet tights, leotards and dancing-school sandals under featherweight couture embroidery, and wore their hair tied with satin ribbons.
The revival of the ballet flat has opened the door to a wider “balletcore” trend. Rudolf Nureyev was the muse for last week’s Dior menswear show in Paris, by British designer Kim Jones. This year marks the centenary of Gabrielle Chanel’s first ballet costumes, which she designed for Le Train Bleu, performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1924.
Chanel’s unassuming designer Virginie Viard did not embrace the look herself, taking her bow wearing a simple black sweater and trousers, but said that she wanted “to bring together the power and finesse of bodies and clothes” that ballet represents. Backstage after the show, she added that she wanted “lots of tulle, and legs, and lightness and summer”.
Julie Gayet was guest of honour at the Chanel show, which opened with a short film featuring Qualley as a young woman who travels to Paris on a quest to replace a lost button on her grandmother’s Chanel jacket. The film features a cameo from Naomi Campbell, and is soundtracked with a new song by Kendrick Lamar.
Chanel flexed its muscles in the US last year with a Met Gala celebrating former designer Karl Lagerfeld in New York, a catwalk show at Paramount studios in LA, and a high profile in Hollywood thanks to house ambassador Margot Robbie, who wore Chanel for much of her on-screen role as Barbie, and for the publicity tour.
This year, Chanel is focusing on Europe, with the next destination show, on 2 May, to be held in Marseille, which has been chosen to “make a stopover in a city open to all cultures”, and celebrate “the energy and cultural vitality of one of the most effervescent cities in the Mediterranean”, the house said in a statement.
Chanel has previously held shows in the southern French beauty spots of Monaco and in Provence, but Marseille, with its multicultural population and historic links to north Africa, represents a grittier and less traditionally glamorous setting, echoing the choice of Manchester for Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show in December.
