Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto

By MiNDFOOD

Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto
Installation view of Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto from 4 December 2021 to 25 April 2022 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy

What: The first exhibition in Australia to exclusively focus on the significant contribution to twentieth-century fashion culture by Gabrielle Chanel is officially open.

Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto is on now at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), presented in partnership with Paris’s Palais Galliera.

With more than 230 garments, accessories and jewellery pieces drawn from the rich holdings of the Palais Galliera and the Patrimoine de CHANEL in Paris, complemented by important loans from major public museums and private collections, Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto showcases the impressive breadth of Gabrielle Chanel’s output and her design codes.

Considered to be one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century, Gabrielle Chanel introduced a language of modernity into fashion that still resonates today.

With the opening of her first fashion boutique in Deauville in 1912, then her couture house on 31 Rue Cambon in Paris in 1918, Chanel began to reform women’s wardrobes by creating a new code of dress that privileged comfort, function and elegance, and responded to the growing desire for greater social freedoms among women.

Installation view of Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto from 4 December 2021 to 25 April 2022 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy

Chanel’s designs offered a restrained luxury that rejected ornamentation and, above all else, allowed women to move with ease.

She pioneered the use of jersey and tweed, drawing inspiration from menswear and sportswear conventions, and championed the ‘little black dress’ and the suit as liberating modes of dress for women.

Unfolding across several chronological and thematic sections, Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto explores Chanel’s design codes through a visually arresting and sumptuous display of more than 100 garments that trace her remarkable career.

These are placed alongside her innovations in perfume, jewellery and accessory design.

Highlights include early examples of her use of black to connote modernity and chic; delicate lace gowns; wool jersey and tailored tweed suits; dazzling beaded garments; and bold costume jewellery.

The survey offers audiences an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate Chanel’s significant impact on the development of womenswear throughout the twentieth century, and to consider the legacy of her designs in contemporary culture.

Where: NGV International, Melbourne.

When: 4 December 2021 – 25 April 2022

For further information and tickets, please visit the NGV website.

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