Where Does Chanel Go From Here?

Earlier this month Virginie Viard, the creative director of Chanel, the second-largest luxury brand in the world by sales, left the house. She had been in her job for approximately five years — ever since the 2019 death of Karl Lagerfeld, her mentor and the brand’s former designer, with whom she had worked closely for decades.

Though critics (including this one) had generally disliked her work, which was awkward and seemed to equate shorts with fresh ideas, brand management had always declared its loyalty to her, and the revenue kept going up: to almost $20 billion last year. The break seemed abrupt and unexplained. One week Ms. Viard was showing her cruise collection in Marseille, France; a few weeks later, she was gone.

According to Bruno Pavlovsky, the president of fashion at Chanel, Ms. Viard did not have anything to do with the couture show held this week. Instead, it was designed, a news release said, by the “Fashion Creation Studio.”

Whether that is true or not — three weeks is an awfully fast turnaround for a 46-look handmade collection, even with 150 people working in six ateliers, as the release stated — the result was even more mediocre than what Ms. Viard had produced. That’s saying something, given the most memorable feature of her last couture was that every look was paired with shiny white tights.

And it revealed, as much as anything, why a designer matters, what the real impact of Ms. Viard’s (brief-ish) tenure may be, and why the question of who gets the job next has become the single most popular subject of conversation alongside the runways — even more than complaining about the road closures for Olympic preparation or fretting about the coming elections in France and the United States.