This show would also take on a special significance. We didn’t know at the time that it would be Virginie Viard’s last one as artistic director of fashion at Chanel. Just a few weeks later, news would break of her shock departure from the house, where she’d spent more than 30 years.
Oblivious to the internal machinations of the brand, we got on with discovering Marseille through a Chanel lens and, over the course of three days, found that there’s more to the place than its grit. France’s second-largest city has a vivid creative scene, with its music, art and dance reverberating through the wider culture. As for Chanel’s rooftop location, Cité Radieuse is no ordinary block of flats. Designed by Le Corbusier in 1947 and completed in 1952, it’s one of the most important buildings of the 20th century and a designated Unesco World Heritage Site. Built as a “machine for living”, with a nursery, supermarket, doctor’s surgery, café, hotel and galleries, its egalitarian “streets in the sky” concept revolutionised how people lived, just as Coco Chanel, a contemporary of Le Corbusier, revolutionised the way they dressed.
The day before
Does someone pre-warn the BA staff in advance of a cruise show trip? “Psst! Uncork the champers and make sure you’ve got plenty of vegetarian options. The fashion pack are on the way.”“How do you spot them?”“Look for the double Cs.” It’s take-off time and the queue for Group 1 boarding is a jostle of quilted flap bags, squishy 22 sacks and tweedy little totes. Group Zero – reserved for people who fly even more than fashion’s gold card holders (e.g. Avril Mair) – has boarded already and consists of one middle-aged man in chinos who was settled snugly (or was it smugly?) into his front row seat by the time the Chanel gang got to theirs. How do you like that?
After we touch down in Marseille, our car speeds past the docks, with its container ships and cruise liners, on the way to the majestic InterContinental hotel, which looks out over the harbour. Before dinner there’s just time to whizz up to our rooms, where we find, among the welcome gifts, a set of Chanel boules and a special box
of Jamie Hawkesworth’s Viard-commissioned portraits of Marseille’s citizens bathed in golden Mediterranean light. With the south of France mood set, we head out to a vegetarian banquet prepared by a Michelin-famed chef in the grounds of the city’s Château Borély. Once the home of a grand family, it’s now a museum of decorative arts and fashion. We tour its salons, which are stuffed with priceless 18th-century porcelain, paintings and clothes (including several pieces from Coco’s personal wardrobe), before heading to two long banqueting tables to feast. The Brits are sat together and soon start swapping notes on the locale. The Guardian’s Jess Cartner-Morley (who always does her research) tells us about an incredible local hardware store, Maison Empereur, that’s like a cross between The Conran Shop and B&Q where you can buy everything from door handles, brackets and hinges to chic French workwear, stylish tableware and huge blocks of the olive oil soap this region is famous for. There’s a sliver of free time tomorrow. We could work in our hotel rooms or go to a museum, but we owe it to the local economy to go mad in that shop.
