13 Red Carpet Highlights From Virginie Viard’s Chanel

From Penélope Cruz to Keira Knightley, take a look at the best red carpet moments from Virginie Viard’s Chanel.

Photo: Getty

Virginie Viard has stepped down from one of the most lauded roles in the fashion industry. The designer last night announced that she would be leaving Chanel after almost 30 years, five of which she spent helming the maison. “Chanel confirms the departure of Virginie Viard after a rich collaboration of five years as artistic director of fashion collections, during which she was able to renew the codes of the house while respecting the creative heritage of Chanel,” the house said in a formal statement. “A new creative organisation will be announced in due course. Chanel would like to thank Virginie Viard for her remarkable contribution to Chanel’s fashion, creativity and vitality.”

This is the first time that Chanel has been leaderless since Karl Largerfeld joined the maison in the 1980s – his then-second-in-command Viard assumed the role upon his passing in 2019 – meaning executives are now faced with the difficult task of finding someone bold enough to match the late designer’s blockbuster reign. Current speculation points towards Celine’s Hedi Slimane as a possible replacement. In the early 2000s, Lagerfeld shed almost 100lbs in order to wear the narrow-cut suits Slimane used to design at Dior Homme, and wrote a book about the process with his doctors in 2004. It’s not difficult to picture Kristen Stewart – one of Lagerfeld and Viard’s most frequent ambassadors – in some rakish tweed tailoring of Slimane’s making.

Stewart – alongside Jennie Kim, Billie Eilish, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley and Tilda Swinton – proved an effective spokesperson for what Viard’s Chanel was all about: a sort of bourgeois girlhood, interrupted. The designer’s mish-mash collections were full of these adventurous young women who looked as though they were perhaps experimenting with their style for the first time in their lives. Her most recent collection had athletic sweatshirts poking out of bright green tweed jackets, classic ballet flats moulded into the shape of scuba shoes, and knitted swimsuits. Everything was just a little bit “off”. Viard’s fascination with this sort of offbeat glamour – where trends and waistlines so often go ignored – meant that her red-carpet looks tended to divide spectators. But isn’t that every rebellious girl’s aim? To throw down the gauntlet (or the Chanel pearl necklace) to established ways of thinking?

From Lily-Rose Depp and Penélope Cruz to Sofia Coppola and Keira Knightley, take a look at a handful of Virginie Viard’s best red carpet moments for Chanel in the gallery below.

Jennie Kim