Chanel has been famously reticent about selling online (as any desginer-savvy online shopper will know, you can't even buy it via boutique sites), but that's all about to change: the label has announced plans to launch into e-commerce.
Chanel President of Fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky (aka the man with the best job title in the world), confirmed the move to WWD at last night's Chanel show in NY, a re-do of the Métiers d'Art show presented in Salzburg last year. But he declined to go into specifics - such as whether the full offer would be available - saying that they're currently 'testing' the strategy.
Image: Kendall Jenner walks the runway at Chanel Paris-Salzburg Métiers d'Art show in December 2014, IMAXTREE
The platform should be good to go by September 2016, he added.
'It’s not so much a shift. It’s an evolution to better serve our customers,' Pavlovsky said when asked about the apparent about-turn.
'Some of the customers are able to come into the boutique. Sometimes they don’t want to because they want to go faster and they know exactly what they want, so it should be able to better respond to the customers’ requests. So it’s more e-service than a pure e-commerce approach.'
In addition to Chanel moving into the e-commerce arena, three of its artisan collaborators - whom the special one-off Métiers D'Art shows celebrate - will follow suit: glove-maker Causse, milliner Maison Michel and cashmere house Barrie Knitwear.
Last year, to celebrate the orignal unveiling of the Paris-Salzburg collection, Chanel's creative director Karl Lagerfeld (a man with his finger on the pulse, if ever there was one), created a short film starring Pharrell Williams and Cara Delevingne. If you missed it the first time around, it's worth a watch while you hover over your laptop in anticipation...
