Virginie Viard will design the collections for the French fashion house Chanel in the future. She was the right hand of Karl Lagerfeld.
The death of designer Karl Lagerfeld (1933-2019), in addition to deep mourning, also raised a question: who will be responsible for the collections of Chanel in the future? Since 1983, the native of Hamburg has influenced the French fashion house. Chanel has already settled Lagerfeld’s succession and announced in an official statement that Virginie Viard will follow in his footsteps.
Alain Wertheimer (70), co-owner and managing director of Chanel, has “commissioned Karl Lagerfeld’s closest associate for more than 30 years […] with the creative work for the collections”. So could “the legacy of Gabrielle Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld live on,” they say.
“Karl Lagerfeld was ahead of his time”
“Thanks to his creative genius, his generosity and his exceptional intuition, Karl Lagerfeld was ahead of his time, which has contributed to the success of Chanel worldwide ,” Wertheimer says of the deceased. “Not only did I lose a friend today, but we all lost an extraordinary creative mind that gave me free rein in the early eighties to reinvent the brand.”
Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s President of Fashion, said: “The biggest tribute we can pay him today is to pursue his chosen path to embrace – as Karl said – ‘the present and the future to invent'”.