Paris Fashion Week AW 2014: Chanel Supermarket Runway

"A little humour is needed." How often can you spot Rihanna and Karl Lagerfeld around the aisles of your supermarket? The "Chanel Shopping Center" offered us this chance! The designer created a fully stocked store under the glass dome of the Grand Palais for his Autumn 2014 collection and rebranded around 500 different products, each new name hinting towards a staple of the House or something significant from its History.

The names of the products represented a beautiful homage to the past of the Chanel House. The guests and the models were greeted at the entrance by a pyramid of coconuts, advertising lait de coco (coconut milk). On the shelves there were household paints with suggestive names, such as Dore Saint-Honoré, Rouge Coromandel or Gris Jersey (Coco Chanel was the first to use jersey in clothes in 1916, until then it was strictly associated with underwear), doormats stamped with the message Mademoiselle Privé (the message on Coco Chanel's studio door), Perles de Lessive washing powder, Savon de Roquebrune soap (the name of the exclusive village on the French Riviera where Chanel built her villa, La Pausa), men's toiletries named after Boy Capel (Coco's great love), jams entitled Les Confitures de Tante-Adrienne (after the name of Coco Chanel's aunt) or Eau de Chanel bottles of mineral water. There were even chainsaws and tea packages called Little Black Tea, after the iconic Little Black Dress that was brought into our fashion dictionaries by Coco Chanel. Have a look at this witty setting and some of the packaging in the store:

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I'm sure that you're all very curious to also see the models mingling around the aisles and shopping, here is the official video of the runway show in the "Chanel Shopping Center". Keep you eyes open, you might spot the meat-packaging-inspired bags and even the chainsaws on the shelves!

I really had a lot of fun with this collection, how about you? What did you think about Karl's shopping center concept?

Photos: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages; Garance Dore;  metro.co.uk; NY Daily News