Gabrielle Chanel was fashion’s original disruptor, long before anyone in the industry thought to (over)use that word. Not only did she topple fashion’s existing vocabulary by ushering in a radically understated new design language that scandalously borrowed from menswear, but she did it as a woman with an impoverished background: an il- legitimate orphan raised in a convent who had gone on to infiltrate otherwise closed circles – and ruffled quite a few marabou feathers doing so.

“She could silence a room suffocating in frills and ribbons with her disciplined, discreet sense of absolute luxury,” says Amanda Harlech, who has worked with Chanel for more than 25 years in what can prob- ably best be described as a creative consultancy role, first as Karl Lagerfeld’s close collaborator and now alongside creative director Virginie Viard. “She broke all the fashion rules – from using men’s underwear tricot to underlining the power of a little whisp of a black dress,” Harlech adds.

And then, once she’d broken all the rules, Chanel’s rebellious new dress codes became fashion law. As the godmother of quiet luxury through her ability to lace restraint with opulence, the pieces she proposed during her 60 years of designing – from the cardigan suit to the little black dress (and just black, really – a colour hitherto reserved for mourning), costume jewellery, two-tone shoes and trousers for women – have reverberated far beyond her lifetime. Timeless, immortal, eternal: easily words that describe what we instinctively think of as ‘the Chanel look’.

Harlech’s thoughts are echoed by sound designer Michel Gaubert, who has been curating Chanel’s aural environments since 1990: “[Gabrielle Chanel] created a style that’s forever, which everyone has interpreted in their own way. I think a lot of people are inspired by the timelessness of Chanel. Basically, that’s the aim of a lot of luxury players. To enter that – I wouldn’t say sanctum, but to obtain, to be considered as such, because Chanel is a legend. The business model is also something people have envied a lot, because now a lot of people do the same.”

The Fashion Manifesto exhibition lays this legend status bare for all to see, and it is obvious why brands today might aspire to reach some- thing similar: Gabrielle Chanel didn’t just nail one item that’s become embedded in contemporary wardrobes. She nailed every single product category. As Oriole Cullen points out, if you talk about perfume, people will always think of Chanel N 5, and if you bring up the topic of classic handbags, people will inevitably think of a quilted Chanel bag. “There isn’t a weak spot or something that isn’t as successful as others. Whether it’s beauty, bags, shoes, jewellery, watches everything works. It’s properly timeless,” Gaubert agrees.

Gaubert’s music for Chanel always has this in mind. “When you walk out of a Chanel show you should feel, oh my God, that was Chanel, you know? And the music has to be part of it. Sometimes it can be very many things. Sometimes it can be very current and a bit obscure and sometimes it can be very popular. It all depends on the mood of the collection. But the idea of timelessness is quite important.” Is it something he discusses with Virginie Viard? “We don’t talk about, we just feel it,” he says with a faint chuckle.

Harlech’s thoughts are echoed by sound designer Michel Gaubert, who has been curating Chanel’s aural environments since 1990: “[Gabrielle Chanel] created a style that’s forever, which everyone has interpreted in their own way. I think a lot of people are inspired by the timelessness of Chanel. Basically, that’s the aim of a lot of luxury players. To enter that I wouldn’t say sanctum, but to obtain, to be considered as such, because Chanel is a legend. The business model is also something people have envied a lot, because now a lot of people do the same.”

The Fashion Manifesto exhibition lays this legend status bare for all to see, and it is obvious why brands today might aspire to reach some- thing similar: Gabrielle Chanel didn’t just nail one item that’s become embedded in contemporary wardrobes. She nailed every single product category. As Oriole Cullen points out, if you talk about perfume, people will always think of Chanel N 5, and if you bring up the topic of classic handbags, people will inevitably think of a quilted Chanel bag. “There isn’t a weak spot or something that isn’t as successful as others. Whether it’s beauty, bags, shoes, jewellery, watches – everything works. It’s properly timeless,” Gaubert agrees.

Gaubert’s music for Chanel always has this in mind. “When you walk out of a Chanel show you should feel, oh my God, that was Chanel, you know? And the music has to be part of it. Sometimes it can be very many things. Sometimes it can be very current and a bit obscure and sometimes it can be very popular. It all depends on the mood of the collection. But the idea of timelessness is quite important.” Is it something he discusses with Virginie Viard? “We don’t talk about, we just feel it,”

“She could silence a room suffocating in frills and ribbons with her disciplined, discreet sense of absolute luxury” - Amanda Harlech

Timelessness and fashion technically aren’t the easiest of bedfellows, though. “It’s a bit of an oxymoron to talk of timelessness in fashion, at least when we look at the traditional definition of fashion that centres on a specific system of dress within Western modernity that implies continual change of the style of clothes, as well as its dynamics of diffusion through collective and individual processes,” notes fashion studies researcher and lecturer Dr Ane Lynge-Jorlén, who is also a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Fashion Studies and the director of Nordic fashion talent platform ALPHA.

“Fashion exists in societies with social mobility, something that Chanel herself experienced, which is also so embedded in her work. Timelessness implies the opposite of change, so the recent focus on timelessness should not only be understood in context of quiet luxury, longevity and responsibility, but also, strangely enough, as a strategy of newness,” Lynge-Jorlén highlights.

Timelessness as a strategy for newness is very Chanel. Gabrielle Chanel constructed a ‘forever’ framework that allows for continuous reinvention within those parameters, and in doing so ensured the un- dying legacy of her name and brand. “There’s a great quote from the fashion journalist Prudence Glynn [from 1971] that we have in one of the text panels in the show, where she says that pictorially Chanel didn’t really evolve, but it was more that fashion evolved around her. That she is this sort of fulcrum that we recognise and yet her clothing always seems to have a place,” Cullen notes.

“Gabrielle Chanel’s timeless appeal – fashion defying fashion which, by its very nature, ceaselessly moves ever forward, the new replacing the old – is the secret code that GO- every designer longs for”

- Amanda Harlech

What does Dr Lynge-Jorlén ascribe Gabrielle Chanel’s timeless- ness to? “Chanel’s early work has a timeless appeal because of its functionality, lack of ornamentation and purism. It represents a certain industrial, stripped bare approach to fashionable silhouettes, and it’s a style that can be easily integrated with other pieces to create your own look. When we look at classics more generally, they seem to have a similar purist and understated appeal,” she says, emphasising items such as the trench coat, jeans and the white shirt.

You also can’t help but draw parallels between Chanel’s penchant for streamlined elegance and the art movements that surrounded her. “It can be useful to understand her work through the lens of what happened in the field of industrial design after WW1 onwards,” Lynge-Jorlén explains. “At the time, we begin to see streamlining of features, all ornamentation is removed and the whole ‘less is more’ ethos of designing where form follows function. Whilst she was innovative in terms of shape and silhouette that allowed women to move, so was her choice of material.”

Clothes that minimised friction, the introduction of stretch to garments, removable collars and cuffs for laundry purposes – all part of her idea to marry utility with luxury, Chanel’s very clever and forward-thinking rebellious way of bringing frisson to haute couture, such as taking things that were considered ‘poor’ (men’s jerseys for womenswear instead of underwear) and blurring the lines between low value and high fashion.

During his reign at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld put his own spin on that concept. “Chanel adapts. They put all the trends through the Chanel lens,” Gaubert says, adding: “Like when Karl did the water bottle holder or the iPhone holder or the moonboots. Everything was Chanel-ised. A very banal or mundane item would all of a sud- den become knighted, you know?” This season’s Chanel flip-flop being another example, he notes.

Of course, Chanel No 5 has a major presence in the exhibition. The holy grail of perfumes, its mere mention conjures an image of the iconic bottle that has only been tweaked ever so slightly since its release in 1921. “You don’t question it,” Gaubert says of the bottle’s untouchable modernity. “Chanel No 5 is still the seductress of all perfumes,” Harlech adds. “It’s the revolutionary simplicity and elegance of the bottle as much as its smell. The two are beautifully and inextricably connected – wondrously conceived and edited, never losing the flower or the glass. No 5 is a work of art.”

The fragrance was also ground-breaking in its scent. “It’s this idea of her wanting to mask the ingredients,” Cullen explains. “Before, the approach to perfume was very much that this was a rose base or a lily base, and what she wants is something that doesn’t smell of anything else except Chanel No 5. That’s something we’re obvi- ously familiar with today in terms of perfume, but at the time that was really quite a radical idea.” What the perfumer Ernest Beaux did to achieve this was to use aldehydes to mask the ingredients. “It’s a very particular scent that you can pick up in a lot of Chanel scents actually. It’s almost a Chanel signature, an invisible signature, within the range of scents,” Cullen notes.

“Everything was Chanel-ised. A very banal or mundane item would all of a sudden become knighted, you know?” - Michel Gaubert