Coco Chanel comes to London. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington will host the first Chanel retrospective of its kind in Britain, from the beginnings when Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel opened her hat boutique in Paris in 1910, through the founding of the house and the presentation of her last collection in 1971, the year Chanel died.
The exhibition will open on 16 September 2023, expected to coincide with London Women’s Fashion Week, and will feature over 180 looks alongside the jewellery, accessories, cosmetics and perfumes for which the designer is famous.
The V&A exhibition is based on the ‘Chanel Manifesto’ exhibition held at Paris’s Palais Galliera in 2020, which details the designer’s revolution in the world of haute couture. The exhibition’s timeline traces her beginnings with some iconic pieces, including the famous 1916 Marinière – a jersey sailor shirt – and the little black dresses and sporty models of the Roaring Twenties through to the sophisticated dresses of the 1930s.
After the Paris exhibition, ‘Chanel Manifesto’ was shown in Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition is specially curated for the V&A and features collections from the Chanel archives as well as pieces from the museum’s holdings.
Popularity of fashion exhibitions
Fashion exhibitions are a major source of revenue for museums and sometimes attract the largest audiences in their history. In 2019, the Dior exhibition at the V&A was seen by almost 600,000 visitors, making it the most visited exhibition in the history of the museum. It drew over 100,000 guests, more than Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in 2015, which attracted 493,043 viewers, breaking the record at the time.
The Chanel retrospective will be on view from September 16, 2023 to February 25, 2024.
This article was previously published on FashionUnited.uk. Translation and editing: Barbara Russ