Chanel’s Itinerant Gabrielle Chanel Exhibition Lands In Shanghai

The first large-scale retrospective about the career of iconic French fashion designer Gabrielle Chanel has landed at Shanghai‘s Power Station of Art, the fourth stop for the sold out exhibition.

Featuring more than 200 pieces from the Palais Galliera collections, the heritage collections of the brand, as well as international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Arizona State University FIDM Museum in Los Angeles, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris, the exhibition offers a comprehensive look at the designer’s six-decade-long career.

Shanghai is the fourth stop on the exhibition’s global tour, after its international debut at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, in 2021. It then traveled to the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo in 2022 before moving to the V&A in London last September.

“Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto” is open to the public until Nov. 24. Tickets cost 100 renminbi, or $13.70.

“When you go to the patrimony, when you see the archive, it’s incredible the contribution she [Gabrielle Chanel] has made, and what we show here is this contribution,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS. 

“We have so many fans here in China, and every time we do an exhibition here, we make sure it is impactful, but with this one, which is about the beginning of the beginning, the Chanel of today, and the Chanel of tomorrow, we wanted to deliver the message to our fans that Chanel is unlike any other brand,” Pavlovsky explained.

“We were going through the exhibition with the Chanel studio this morning, and they knew everything by heart,” Pavlovsky said of Chanel’s design collective following the abrupt departure of Virginie Viard as creative director. “But they are discovering new aspects of Chanel with a different mise-en-scene.”

Later this year, Chanel will be hosting back-to-back runway shows in China — in November, Chanel will reprise its cruise 2025 show in Hong Kong, then in December, the brand will take its next Métiers d’Art collection to Hangzhou — signaling the company’s commitment to the market despite a broader slowdown.

“We have canceled [shows] three times in Hong Kong, all of which is not because of us, so it is very important to go back, it was our first option,” Pavlovsky said. 

As for the December show, Pavlovsky wanted to keep details under wraps for now, but said Chanel’s big moment in Hangzhou will incarnate “a modern vision of the exhibition, of a real vision of what Chanel is today.”

The local luxury mall Tower Hangzhou, home to the city’s only Chanel fashion boutique in the city, proudly unveiled in 2022 that sales reached 1.8 billion renminbi, or around $250 million. But for Pavlovsky, the December show is not meant to only cater to the local VIPs, but “more about looking for a symbol, an image that is a part of the modernity of the brand,” he added.

To display such modernity at PSA, a former power plant, Chanel worked with New York-based design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) and Chinese graphic designer Jumping He to set up an immersive scenography. By deploying various forms of technology, including multilayered video projection, PDLC smart glass display systems, and atmospheric lighting, the exhibition brought to life the designer’s timeless creations across fashion, accessories, beauty and high jewelry in 10 sections.

“The goal was to reimagine the project around the same big ideas,” said Miren Arzalluz, director of the Palais Galliera and curator of the exhibition. “The scenography is not only about the space, but also a part of the expression that conveys ideas of simplicity, radicality, the pure lines of the objects.”

“The biggest challenge was the conservation of the extremely fragile textiles,” Arzalluz said. “That meant we had to rotate the dresses and replace them every time, there are pieces we had never shown before, new acquisitions that were made in the last months that we are finally able to present here.”

Despite the downpour of the plum rains on Thursday night, the brand hosted a star-studded VIP dinner with celebrities including Tilda Swinton, Zhou Xun, Wang Yibo, Jing Boran and Leah Dou, as well as key editors, patrons of the museum and creatives from the Chinese film industry. 

For Dou, the daughter of the famed Chinese singer Faye Wong, Gabrielle Chanel’s relentless pursuit of “simple elements” struck a chord. The Gen Z singer and songwriter also unveiled that her first Chanel item was a cleansing mousse. 

“It’s the same aspiration I have for creating music, I want to make sure each musical element is put to good use, instead of sampling a hodgepodge of tunes,” Dou added.