Chanel is strengthening its cultural initiatives with celebrations for its centenary in the U.K.

The French brand is launching Arts & Culture Magazine, a publication that revisits the brand’s work with artists and cultural institutions in the last five years. The project is led by Chanel’s Culture Fund and Yana Peel, the president of arts, culture and heritage at the brand.

To inaugurate the publication, Chanel has taken over the Foreign Exchange News in Bayswater in London until June 28.

The first issue of Arts & Culture Magazine, otherwise known as Vol. 1, will also be available in 20 bookstores worldwide including shops in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Bangkok, Berlin, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Milan, New York, Paris, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo and Zurich.

The magazine will be carried by Foreign Exchange News, Tenderbooks, Rococo News & Magazines and Reference Point in London and RIPE Mags in Glasgow.

The magazine is a visual feast with multiple paper types across 250 pages produced in English. Chanel has asked the creatives involved to share their insights on the future.

The launch of Arts & Culture Magazine is part of the brand’s push for supporting print and bookstores around the world. The magazine’s cover uses items from Gabrielle Chanel’s personal collection: a statue bust of the designer made by Jacques Lipchitz in 1921 wearing metallic Chanel sunglasses from the brand’s fall 2002 show shot by Roe Ethridge.

Other images in the issue include a white shell-like tray with gold interiors that holds an array of pearls with a bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a colored seashell, and a collage of lion prints, which is a subtle hint to the founder’s zodiac sign.

Last week, Chanel toasted to its 100 years in the U.K. with an intimate 100-guest dinner and a ballet performance behind a Pablo Picasso stage cloth at the V&A East Storehouse in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

“Everything goes back to Gabrielle and the U.K. still has this special place for the house because we still source tweed and cashmere from the U.K.,” Elizabeth Anglès d’Auriac, president of Chanel U.K., told WWD.

“Things become evident and ideas bubble up when you start getting interested in your local environment, your clients and the culture environment. We always think about creation, creativity and craftsmanship — it’s our heritage, but it’s also in our present and future,” she said.

Chanel is funding a new Chanel Center for Artists and Technology at the California Institute of the Arts, which is slated to begin work this fall.

The Center, at the Santa Clarita, Calif. campus, is aimed at providing CalArts students, faculty, and visiting fellows across the creative disciplines access to leading tech for research, experimentation and education, with a focus on AI/ machine learning and digital imaging. It also aims to link museums, universities, and technology companies. A search for an executive director is currently underway.

The Chanel Culture Fund will provide resources for equipment; visiting experts, artists, and technologists-in-residence; graduate fellowships; and future-focused research and creation. The Center also aims to host an annual forum addressing artists’ engagement with emerging technologies.

“The Chanel Center for Artists and Technology at CalArts makes real an endeavor that’s long been in our dreams,” said CalArts president Ravi S. Rajan. “At CalArts, we recognize that throughout history and across cultures, it’s the artists who consistently lead us toward a more imaginative, compelling, and just future. I’m grateful to the Chanel Culture Fund for embracing our shared vision of centering artists at the forefront of shaping the technologies that will inform our collective lives and society. It’s in CalArts’ DNA to create game-changing initiatives — since its founding by Walt and Roy Disney, CalArts’ evolution has been inseparable from that of the industries it influences. Through the Chanel Center for Artists and Technology, CalArts will continue this legacy by helping define the future of technology in the arts.”

Added Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, “Artists have always shown us what’s next through the constant evolution of new ideas. In the ever-changing age of AI, the Chanel Center for Artists and Technology will enable and encourage creatives across disciplines to harness that innovation — to take human imagination further than ever before.”

Irene Kim, who for the last three years was the global head of VIP relations for Art Basel, has left the fair to join Chanel as head of the luxury brand’s US arts and culture division, according to a post on LinkedIn. Kim is the first person to hold the position.

Before heading up the Art Basel’s VIP program, Kim worked for six years as head of the regional US VIP program. Prior to that, she ran the VIP program at the Armory Show in New York.

Her departure marks the second high-profile personnel loss for Art Basel in less than a month. In mid-January, Dunja Gottweis, who formerly worked as Art Basel’s global head of gallery relations, was named director of Art Dubai. Additionally, Alexie Glass-Kantor, who since 2015 had curated the Encounters section at Art Basel Hong Kong, was hired for the new position of executive director of curatorial operations for Art Dubai’s parent company, Art Dubai Group. In August 2024 she said this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong will be her last.

Chanel declined to comment on its new hire. A spokesperson for Art Basel told ARTnews that while Kim’s replacement has not yet been appointed, the move will not impact the upcoming edition of the fair in Basel, Switzerland. “We have a large and experienced VIP team who work with our network of VIP representatives across key markets and fair leadership to serve our global VIP community,” the spokesperson said.

Earlier this year, the Chanel Culture Fund announced a three-year partnership with the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, establishing what will now be known as the Chanel Commission, an annual initiative designed to facilitate large-scale, innovative art installations.

The inaugural commission, debuting on May 1 during Berlin Gallery Weekend, will be done by the Berlin-based artist Klára Hosnedlová. 

Update, 2/4/25, 3:35 p.m.: This story has been updated to include a statement from Art Basel.

Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin has announced a significant three-year partnership with the Chanel Culture Fund to establish the Chanel Commission, an annual initiative designed to facilitate large-scale, innovative art installations. 

The collaboration, set within the museum’s iconic 2,500-square-meter historic hall, aims to redefine the scope of public art commissions by offering a platform for ambitious projects that engage with “the complexities of contemporary life.” The inaugural commission, led by Berlin-based artist Klára Hosnedlová, will debut on May 1, 2025, during Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Hosnedlová’s installation, titled em-brace, represents her largest institutional solo exhibition to date. The work incorporates a diverse range of materials, including flax fibers, embroidery, cast glass, sandstone, and concrete, to create a utopian landscape that interacts with the monumental architecture of the museum. Featuring nine-meter-high tapestries and site-specific objects inspired by her performative interventions, the installation explores themes of belonging, utopia, and the human condition under changing political systems. The exhibition will run until October 26, 2025, and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale Milano.

Originally a 19th-century train station, Hamburger Bahnhof has evolved into a premier contemporary art institution. Founded in 1996 the Bahnhof holds the Nationalgalerie’s art collection with works dated from 1960s and onwards with a special focus on new media and time-based works. Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, said the collaboration is “one of the most ambitious Chanel Culture Fund projects to date, the commission gives artists at the vanguard an opportunity to push the boundaries of installation art and sculpture in the heart of Berlin.”

Last year, Chanel signed on to a partnership with Shanghai’s Power Station of Art “to restore the museum and enrich its collection and research capacity” and helped the Centre Pompidou add the work of 15 contemporary Chinese artists born from the late 1970s to the early ’90s into the museum’s permanent collection, expanding the museum’s collection of Chinese contemporary art by more than 20 percent.

A major group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou has brought the work of 15 contemporary Chinese artists into the museum’s permanent collection, expanding that collection by more than 20 percent.

The exhibition, “目 China: A New Generation of Artists,” presents the recent work of Chinese artists born from the late 1970s to the early ’90s. Notably, seven of the 15 artists whose work was ultimately acquired by the Centre Pompidou were women. Prior to the acquisition, there were 58 Chinese contemporary artist’s in the museum’s permanent collection.

Since the Covid 19 pandemic, artists in the region have had difficulty cultivating an audience outside of mainland China, the museum said, and this exhibition gives visibility to a group that has the unique perspective of living their formative years during China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.

Alice Chen, Chen Wei, Cui Jie, Hu Xiaoyuan, and Lu Yang are among the artists featured in “目China: A New Generation of Artists” whose work now sits in the museum’s permanent collection. Both the exhibition and the acquisitions were largely made possible by Chanel, which has a history of promoting and expanding Sino-French relations in the arts and culture sector. 

Earlier this year, Chanel announced a partnership with Shanghai’s Power Station of Art that would see the restoration and enhancement of that museum, its collection, and its capacity to do research. 

“I am delighted that Chanel’s support will enable the Centre Pompidou to acquire works by some of the most dynamic young Chinese artists working today,” Yana Peel, global head of arts and culture at Chanel, said in a press release. “We are proud that the multifaceted and long-term partnership between Chanel and Centre Pompidou celebrates creativity in China, bringing it to diverse audiences in Paris and around the world.”

In that same release the Centre Pompidou’s president, Laurent Le Bon, thanked Chanel for helping the museum “deepen our engagement with the vibrant contemporary Chinese art,” an initiative the museum began with the “Alors la Chine?” exhibition in 2003.

Since then, the museum has worked to strengthen French-Chinese cultural collaborations. In November 2019, the museum inked a five year partnership with the Shanghai West Bund Museum that would see each institution lend works and experience to the other and support each other in organizing certain exhibitions. That partnership was extended for an additional five years in 2023.

The exhibition opened on October 9, just days before the art world descended upon Paris for the opening days of the newly rebranded Art Basel Paris, which opened to VIPs on October 16 in the Grand Palais.

Just in time for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of China-France diplomatic relations and the Year of Cultural and Tourism exchange between the two countries, Chanel and Shanghai’s Power Station of Art signed a strategic partnership on Monday to restore the museum and enrich its collection and research capacity.

The French luxury brand first launched a partnership with PSA in 2021 as a part of the “Next Cultural Producer” initiative. The two-year program marked the company’s first partnership with a museum in Asia. 

The forging of the partnership means Chanel will be “taking on a greater cultural role in this multipolar world,” as well as presenting a model for Chinese contemporary culture, empowering contemporary urban cultural life, and shaping a global culture brand for Shanghai, the French company added.

PSA is the first state-run contemporary art museum in mainland China. Located in a former power plant along the Huangpu River, the museum spans more than 441,000 square feet and opened in 2012.

“We are now thrilled to witness PSA on this journey to foster a powerhouse of ideas and innovation for the years to come,” said Renaud Bailly, Chanel’s president of North Asia. 

“This long-term partnership marks a new chapter in the house’s commitment in China,” Bailly added.

For Yana Peel, global head of arts and culture at Chanel, the extension of the partnership in size and scope means the French house will be able to support “big ideas that will influence art and culture worthy of a transformed station of power — for the audiences PSA serves now and for the future.”

Also playing up the voltage metaphor, Gong Yan, director of PSA, said that the partnership will “eventually enable the PSA to become a comprehensive power station of cultural energy.”

“PSA is built for the memory of the future. It belongs to all those who have been to this city and those who will stay in the future,” Gong added. 

More specifically, Chanel will fund “a comprehensive upgrade” of the third floor of PSA, which will be named the Espace Gabrielle Chanel. 

The floor, spanning more than 10,000 square feet, will include the first public “Contemporary Art Library” in mainland China, an “Archive of Chinese Contemporary Art,” the exhibition space “Power Station of Design,” a small “Arts Theater” and a “Riverside Terrace.”

In addition, Chanel’s itinerant retrospective, “Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto,” will land at PSA in July. The exhibition will include an additional section that looks at Chanel’s connections to China and Chinese culture.

Apart from PSA, Chanel also works with Hong Kong’s M+, one of Asia’s most popular art museums that opened last year. To boost the museum’s moving image offerings, the program has named Silke Schmickl as Chanel lead curator of Moving Image at M+.

Ten artists from a wide range of disciplines, from opera to fine art to video game development, have been named among the second group of winners of the Chanel Next Prize, which comes with a no-strings-attached €100,000 ($108,000) purse and two years of mentorship from the brand’s global partners. 

The prize, which is awarded every two years, was first established in 2021, though its roots go back a century, according to the global head of arts and culture at the French fashion house, Yana Peel.

“It’s really a prize that’s focused on the new and the next,” Peel told ARTnews. “Gabrielle Chanel wanted to be part of the future. I love the audacity and the curiosity of giving artists time and space and resources.”

There are no terms attached to the prize. Rather, according to Peel, the artists are meant to continue redefining their respective disciplines.

The winners include Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist Tolia Astakhishvili; artist and filmmaker Kantemir Balagov; Oona Doherty a Belfast-born, Marseille-based choreographer who works at the forefront of contemporary dance; game designer Sam Eng, from New York; Ho Tzu Nyen, the artist who represented Singapore at the 2011 Venice Biennale; San Diego–based visual artist and director Fox Maxy; Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), an American musician, poet and visual artist; Brazilian portraitist Dalton Paula; Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir; and Virginia-born opera singer and curator Davóne Tines.

These artists’ practices are dissimilar, but Peel said that is entirely by design. “In the spirit of dialogue there is no hierarchy to their disciplines at all. Chanel has never created that kind of separation and that allows the cohort to have these amazing cross-disciplinary transversal conversations.“

The winners were chosen last year at the Royal College of Art by a jury that included venerable figures in the arts including actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and curators Legacy Russell and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

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The Headlines

COLIN FORBES, a founder of the storied design firm Pentagram, died on Sunday at the age of 94, the New York Times reports. With four others, Forbes established Pentagram in 1972 in London, with the aim of making “something in between a boutique firm and a large Madison Avenue-type concern,” journalist Neil Genzlinger writes. Fifty years later, it now has 23 partners, more than 200 employees, and offices in New York, Berlin, and Austin, Texas. Forbes, who retired from the company in 1993, served as president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and won its AIGA medal. Among his many design credits, the firm said, was the creation of a logo that the Japanese carmaker Nissan long used, corporate identities for Neiman Marcus and British Petroleum, and a “poster advocating free admission to London museums that was a petition he signed with famous artists signatures.”

ARTS AWARDS. The Wallace Foundation has selected 18 arts organizations of color in the United States that it will support with up to $3.75 million each over the next five years, the New York Times reports. The groups include the Laundromat Project in Brooklyn, the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. “It’s about: What are the aspirations for their future?” Bahia Ramos, the foundation’s director of arts, told the paper. Meanwhile, the Iranian artist Azin Zolfaghari was named the 2022 winner of the Sovereign Art Foundation’s Sovereign Asian Art Prize, which comes with $30,000, Ocula reports, and Jae-min Cha has won the third Artspectrum Award from the Leeum Museum in Seoul.

The Digest

Two people tried to make off with a print of a Jean-Michel Basquiat work from Taglialatella Galleries in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood last weekend but were stopped by an employee. Police said they are investigating. The pair did abscond with a mostly empty bottle of whiskey. [Hyperallergic]

An NFT of a digital pair of Nike sneakers designed by artist Takashi Murakami has traded for $134,000. The shoes were released last month as part of a collection of 20,000 NFTs from the shoe giant. Naturally, that series is called Cryptokicks. [The New York Times]

Artist and musician Bob Dylan has made a new recording of his 1962 classic “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and a single recording of it will be offered at Christie’s in London in July with a top estimate of £1 million ($1.26 million). Audiophiles take note—it is being released on a special analog disc developed by producer T Bone Burnett. [The Guardian]

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will stage the first retrospective ever devoted to fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in the United Kingdom. Featuring some 180 designs, it will open in September. [The Guardian]

While the fabled Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, a landmark of Japanese modernism, is being demolished, parts of it will live on. Some of the 140 capsules that comprise the building are going to museums. [Associated Press/Bloomberg]

A study of the DNA of a man who was killed by the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii in 79 revealed that he was descended from people woh lived in Sardinia and Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey. [The New York Times]

The Kicker

A MEMORABLE TRIBUTE. The London arts patron Delfina Entrecanales, who died earlier this year at the age of 94, was famous for her energy and candor, and it sounds like the speeches that were delivered in a breakfast in her honor this week lived up to her reputation. In the Art Newspaper, correspondent Louisa Buck reports on some of the remarks delivered by Aaron Cezar, the director of her Delfina Foundation. “There was fifty years between us: we laughed like kids, quarreled like teenagers and bickered like an old couple,” Cezar said. “We were a walking HR disaster.” [TAN]

Chanel has named the inaugural winners of its Chanel Next Prize, a new biennial award that the French label founded in March to support 10 international artists and creatives working across film, music, performance, and visual art. The prize was founded as part of a larger initiative termed the Chanel Culture Fund, established earlier this year in the wake of the pandemic to expand the luxury label’s backing of the arts.

The award is given to artists who the fashion label believes are redefining their respective fields. In a statement, Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, explained that the prize falls in line with the legacy of the label’s founder, the late Gabrielle Chanel, who supported avant-garde artists of her era. “We extend Chanel’s deep history of cultural commitment—empowering big ideas and creating opportunities for an emerging generation of artists to imagine the next,” she said.

Each winner will receive €100,000 ($113,000). With it comes access to a network of mentors selected by the brand over the next 20 months. Each recipient will be allowed to allocate the prize funding to any project of their choosing.

Under the Chanel Culture Fund, Chanel will also partner with a number of institutions to establish other awards and back exhibition programming. Among Chanel’s collaborators are Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, and GES-2, a newly opened contemporary art center in Moscow.

The 10 recipients of the prize were selected by actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and architect David Adjaye. Each artist was nominated by an advisory board of 25 international leaders in the cultural sector working in various fields. Below, a look at the winners of the inaugural group of the Chanel Next Prize:

– Jung Jae-il, a Seoul-born, Berlin-based composer whose work merges Korean and Western sounds.
–Keiken, a London- and Berlin-based collective comprising artists Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos, and Tanya Cruz, whose work make use of installations, performances, gaming engines, and augmented reality.
– Lual Mayen, a South Sudanese refugee and game designer engineering educational and social impact tools.
– Marlene Monteiro Freitas, a Lisbon-based dancer whose choreography references her native island of Cape Verde.
– Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-Welsh director and screenwriter based in London who gained recognition for her 2017 film I Am Not a Witch.
– Precious Okoyomon, an artist and poet based in New York, who won the 2021 Frieze Artist Award and is known for their immersive installations that examine the natural world and its ties to racial histories.
– Marie Schleef, a Berlin-based director whose work examines the dynamics of male-dominated theatre conventions.
– Botis Seva, a London-based dancer and choreographer whose practice is rooted in hip-hop.
– Wang Bing, a filmmaker known for projects that examine people at the margins of Chinese society.
– Eduardo Williams, an artist and filmmaker based in Paris and Buenos Aires whose documentary and fictional works examine the role of the camera.

*Correction 12/13/2021: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the amount of each prize award as $130,000. The correct amount is $113,000.

“How many slaves did it take to make that?” It was a Wednesday afternoon in early May, and K8 Hardy and I had just entered “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on view through Aug. 14). We were confronted by the ostensible centerpiece of the show—a recent Karl Lagerfeld design for Chanel, a queenly wedding ensemble, its long train embroidered with thousands of gold beads. “When I see so much handiwork, it really stresses me out,” she continued. “I just think of all the women sewing with tiny little needles forever and ever.”

Hardy, a Brooklyn-based artist whose sculptures and photo projects often engage her interest in style, recently released her first feature film, Outfitumentary (2016), a chronicle of her outfits that looks like a vlog, though she started it eleven years ago, before the advent of video diaries. The informal documentary evinces her evolving gender identities and personae, but more than that it’s a fun and highly relatable ode to choosing outfits. Hardy has a background as a stylist in the fashion industry and she referenced personal experiences working with designers represented in the exhibition throughout our tour. “I don’t know if it was a background or just a little spree, trying to get by and do fun freelance work but, yeah, I have been witness to many fashion shoots,” she said. Hardy made a subversive, thrift-store entrance into fashion in her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. “I got kicked out of high school one day,” she mentioned, “for having a Born Against T-shirt with a soldier saluting a coffin that said, ‘I pledge allegiance to shit.’”

That background seemed worlds away from the haute-couture fashions displayed in the Met’s blockbuster, organized by the Costume Institute. Showcasing over 170 ensembles spanning from the twentieth century to today that exemplify achievements in technology and craftsmanship, the exhibition is structured in sections based on material or technique, including toiles, pleating and folding, lacework and leatherwork, embroidery, feathers, and artificial flowers. 

As we walked through the winding scrims that have transformed the Lehman wing into an ethereal atelier-like showroom, Hardy expressed her primary concerns with the show, namely women’s labor and the female body. “These look like dresses for children,” she said, standing before impossibly tight-hipped designs by Dior from the 1950s. “I don’t know how a woman-person fits into them.” She’s critical of the fashion industry at large, but has a great passion for personal style. “Where I grew up, you could really make a statement by how you dressed and you could really upset people.” Unconventional outfits by younger avant-garde designers like Belgian Iris van Herpen, whose high-tech, sculptural dresses were a standout, excited her most. A hand-painted mini dress from 2013 coated in gray and purple polyurethane resin and iron fillings, for example, was hand-sculpted with magnets. “Neon Dans la Nuit,” a digital-looking skirt suit with optical neon green stitching by Thierry Mugler from the early ’90s elicited awe at the technology of textiles, rather than machines. “To have planned the embroidery lines on that without a computer is incredible. It has a very hand-sewn, futuristic look. I like that.”

Like many viewers, we couldn’t help but think of the exhibition as an extravagant shopping spree, pointing out the clothes that we would like to wear. We imagined slightly different cuts, creating our own dream outfits. We soon turned to find ourselves in the sequin section of the exhibition. As we stood before an elaborate 2015 dress with daring cutouts by Proenza Schouler, Hardy remarked that the clothes on view cost more than her artworks. “I love Proenza, but it’s true luxury,” she said. “They have great textiles. I like the cut. Except for the neck.”

Sequins frequently reappeared throughout the show, especially in the embroidery section. The patterns and iridescence of many dresses recalled the scales of tropical fish. A truly aquatic 2012 creation by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen left Hardy aghast at what appear to be twisting coral branches covering the garment. “That’s an environmental disaster right there. The shape is incredible but that much coral?” she said. “Put it back in the ocean, seriously.” I agreed, but later found out that much of the dress is made of pink-dyed shells.

As we entered the feathers section, which includes some of the most fabulous pieces in the show, she breathed a sigh of relief. “I feel a little bit better about feathers because I think, ‘Oh, maybe the animal didn’t die, you know. They just plucked it a million times.’” She was particularly taken by forward-looking Balenciaga and Givenchy designs from the 1960s. The section opened with a pair of Gareth Pugh dresses made entirely from drinking straws cut and attached by hand, producing a surprisingly featherlike effect. Hardy is a Pugh fan, and recalls working with him when she was styling videos for the electronic music duo Fischerspooner and he was an up-and-coming designer making their costumes. 

Japanese designer Issey Miyake is amply represented in the pleats section with a selection of origami-inspired dresses displayed in various folded states. Hardy was impressed by a dress he created from recycled bottles. She’s interested in sustainability: “That’s the direction fashion should go,” she said. But she also reveres textiles often considered in bad taste. “I love polyester,” she said at one point. “That’s really one of the greatest technologies.” Though she complained about expense, Hardy was equally put off by the thought of the dirt-cheap clothes sold at mass-market retailers like Wal-Mart, where she once found a pair of jeans for seven dollars. “If you do all the math in your head—producing the cotton, the dying, the construction, and the shipping,” she said, “you have to wonder: how did all of these things get made?”

By the end of the exhibition, Hardy found herself dissatisfied with the show’s prioritizing of one particular ideal and its inattention to other sorts of social innovations in women’s dress. To her, the show is “the epitome of a lot of women’s fashion fantasy”—the special wedding-day moment when a woman is the most beautiful one in the room. Hardy noticed that there are no pants in the show. And “where’s the development for the waist to expand and contract?” she grumbled. “You can’t really stay the same size even within one month of time.” 

I wondered if she had ever had this kind of fantasy herself—the Cinderella moment. “No, I’m Cinderella every day,” she laughed. “That’s about getting the right invitation. I like getting dressed up and going out. I like being seen. But a lot of the dresses in this show represent this ultra-feminine ideal. You could see some of the more modern designers messing with that, like Pugh and van Herpen and Miyake.”

She found a silver lining in this narrative, though. “Historically,” she mused, “these were powerful moments for women to express themselves, even if it had to be at a ball or at her wedding—they’re moments when women had a voice.”