“We’ll leave it at that”: with these words from one of Chanel’s owners, designer Virginie Viard learnt on June 5, 2024 that the brand where she had spent 30 years would no longer be hers by that very evening – an episode she dissects in her autobiography.
French designer Virginie Viard, in Paris, on 5 October 2026 – AFP / Joel Saget
In “Un regard, Une Vie chez Chanel” (Éditions Stock), the couturière displays a level of candour rarely seen in the hushed world of fashion and sets out the reasons for her fall – one of the most brutal of recent talent shake-ups – which saw her “unplugged” on the eve of a show she had herself prepared.
“It’s a combination of things that means, suddenly, it just doesn’t work anymore,” says the designer in an interview with AFP. She joined Chanel as an intern in 1987 and was chosen to succeed Karl Lagerfeld after his death in 2019.
A month before her dismissal, the Chanel show in Marseille – staged on the rooftops of the Cité Radieuse, in the rain – was poorly received. In the book, the designer writes that no one within the house tried to avert this disaster.
Yet there had been signs.
“Coming after Karl”
“I tell myself that I’m too straightforward. Too emotional. Perhaps too old for those chess games (…) that play out in the corridors of the big fashion houses, and which I never wanted to see because I wasn’t interested,” she reflects.
Viard kept herself at a distance from everyone, as discreet as her mentor was flamboyant: invisible in the press, refusing interviews, slipping away after the shows.
“And yet I’m not at all difficult to approach. I just didn’t realise!” she says of the tweed cocoon in which she shut herself away, swept up in the relentless pace of the annual collections. Her biggest mistake, she now believes, was not having put a counterpart in place – her own “Karl” – to help her run the house.
After two years of introspection and “coaching” that she says saved her, Viard finally finds the words for this ordeal: “What’s difficult… is coming after Karl.”
“My role was to make sure Karl could be Karl, fully and completely,” she recalls, adding that when the designer was multiplying his projects, it was she who “kept the house together.”
“There was no other designer who could draw like him. Not just a skirt or a collar, but warmth or cold, a feeling, an attitude,” she adds.
Coaching
During her tenure, sales nonetheless soared, reaching a record of nearly 20 billion dollars in 2023. But the figures were not her concern.
“I was completely protected from all that. Of course, if something wasn’t working, I knew and could make changes, but, to use Karl’s favourite expression, ‘it wasn’t going to make the next one’ (collection, ed.),” she explains.
Her work, whether in ready-to-wear or haute couture, was nevertheless criticised in fashion circles for occasionally uncertain design and a perceived lack of risk-taking.
Blazy succeeded her in 2025.
“A man, much younger,” notes Viard. “Not your grandmother’s Chanel,” read the headline in The New York Times about his first collection, which was widely acclaimed and literally flew off the shelves.
Watching a Chanel show is now a torment for its former artistic director: she can only face it in small doses, “a few looks”. “Always the next day.”
She remains as discreet as ever, appearing only at the show of her friend Stella McCartney, and confides in her book that she was relieved the high priestesses of fashion did not completely snub her.
Reflecting on the world she once knew and adored, Viard believes that fashion today lacks “intimacy”, that everyone is expected “to look in the same direction”, and that style must remain something that “fluctuates.”
She admits she has received offers, “but I need that encounter with someone, that ‘spark’, and for it to make me dream,” she sighs.
