Chanel’s British muse | financial times

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Anne Gunning (1929-90) is sometimes referred to as one of the first “supermodels”; british was a staple of Life magazine and Fashion, photographed by Norman Parkinson or Milton H Greene. However, he still had professional regrets. In the 1950s, Coco Chanel asked her to model a collection in a show, but Gunning, comfortable only being photographed, did not. “That sea of ​​faces looking at me was too daunting,” she later told a writer. “I should have. I could have gotten all my Chanel suits for free if I had!

Three of Gunning’s purchases appear in the successful V&A exhibition Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto. A “reimagining” of an exhibition first seen at the Palais Galliera in Paris, it is the first UK retrospective of the designer, who died in 1971. If your aim is to illustrate her revolutionary approach, it is also an opportunity to highlight Chanel’s many links to Britain. “They’re really lovely pieces,” Oriole Cullen, the V&A’s senior fashion curator, says of Gunning’s clothing: a hoary tweed coat with pink cuffs, a black lace evening dress with a flared hem, and a burgundy skirt suit. with characteristic sweater. covering. Gunning worked for all the big designers, Cullen says, “but she chose Chanel for herself,” most notably for her wedding to British politician Sir Anthony Nutting in 1961.

The color combinations he used in the 60s were just amazing: super acid bright greens, crazy pinks, really hot oranges…

Meanwhile, Chanel’s interest in Gunning isn’t surprising. Tall and slender, the model was an ideal of elegance that the designer saw in herself and enthusiastically propagated. And it wasn’t her first resort to British chic. Part of the Chanel myth is how, during her romance with the Duke of Westminster in the 1920s, the designer fell in love with her tweeds and appropriated them for her own purposes. Later, in 1932, he created British Chanel Limited, working with a group of British textile manufacturers: lace from Nottingham, velvet from Manchester, wools and fabrics from Broadhead and Graves in Huddersfield… To launch it, he organized a public fashion event two weeks. show in Grosvenor Square. She pointed out how Chanel was modern not only in her designs but also in her spread. “People could come with their dressmakers as many times as they wanted,” says Cullen. “I knew they would come and probably copy her work. And if there are many people wearing the chanel stylethen there will be more people who will aspire to have a Chanel suit”.

Gunning’s clothes also help tell a perhaps less familiar story: the late Chanel, which is full of surprising experimentation. “The color combinations she wore in the 1960s were just amazing,” Cullen says, “super acid bright greens, crazy pinks, really hot oranges.” And while Chanel complained about the New Look, the tight, structured style championed by Christian Dior, she clearly took it into account. Gunning’s burgundy suit “actually has a pretty tight waist,” Cullen says, but, fittingly, “it’s a comfortable, wearable waist.” For Chanel, moving the needle was sometimes radical, sometimes subtle.

“Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto” is at the V&A South Kensington, London, from September 16, 2023 to February 25, 2024.