The famous West Lake (Lake Xihu) in Hangzhou, China will be the location of the CHANEL 2024/25 Métiers d’art collection. The show is a celebration of the Fashion Métiers d’art skill and knowledge in artisanal craft, and Hangzhou is a fitting setting, given the city’s exceptional heritage of silk manufacturing and trade. The city is a centre for creativity, as well as craft: the beauty of its landscapes and lakes have inspired countless poets and artists, and now they form the backdrop for a new film by Wim Wenders, featuring actresses and House ambassadors Tilda Swinton and Xin Zhilei and the newly appointed CHANEL ambassador Leah Dou.
The film pays homage to a poignant link between the West Lake and CHANEL’s founder Gabrielle Chanel. From her Paris home, she regarded visions of the lake daily, rendered on a Chinese lacquer screen. The screen was part of a collection of some twenty Coromandel pieces, dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries, which she amassed across her lifetime. “I would faint with happiness when I walked into a Chinese art dealer and saw a Coromandel,” she once said. The screen depicting Hangzhou was the largest in her collection, and it adorned her private office at her home on Rue Cambon. The special antique formed Wenders’s starting point for this new film. On the Coromandel screen, as in the film, the lake is the setting for exchanges and interactions: life unfolds as the surface of the water ripples, and as breeze blows against the trees that neighbor the many canals, bridges and pagodas. The screen, and its motifs, became a conduit for Mademoiselle Chanel’s creative dreaming – though she never visited China herself, the images contained within her screens and, in turn, her imagination, fueled her visual language. Details from Chinese culture appeared across her creations from the 1950s and 60s. For Mademoiselle Chanel, the lake continued a role it has had throughout history, as a catalyst for legends and storytelling.
Wenders’s new film, commissioned to mark the CHANEL 2024/25 Métiers d’art collection in Hangzhou, pays homage to the lake’s significant heritage, and to the possibility of transcending reality through image and inspiration. The film is a celebration of travel, both literal and imagined. It celebrates the vitality and connections that come when dialogues are built across cultures.
In Wenders’s film, Mademoiselle Chanel’s screen is reimagined as a new window to the world, with the help of contemporary technology, from laptop screens to cameras. The dreams of the past and the habits of modern life combine, a nod to the magnificence of Hangzhou, a contemporary metropolis that embraces both tradition and newness. Just like its setting, this film strays between past and present, fantasy and reality, showing how curiosity can be ignited by image, interchange, and an open-mind.
