‘Coco Chanel’s Roaring Twenties’ Examines Sporty Silhouettes and Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations

There’s no dimming the cachet around Chanel: as recently as December 2024, the brand generated feverishness when Matthieu Blazy was announced as Karl Lagerfeld’s heir. The exhibition “Les Années folles de Coco Chanel” (“Coco Chanel’s Roaring Twenties”) at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco through October 5 explores the OG designer’s work within the specific context of the Riviera in the 1920s and, in the process, reaffirms that the modern feverishness around her brand has been palpable since its debut.

The villa-turned-museum is perched on a cliffside with views of the sea. Inside, there are thirty Chanel garments and accessories ranging from a white silk taffeta pleated daytime dress to a black wide-brimmed braided Italian straw hat with silk ribbon, all designed by Gabrielle herself. These are paired with works by artists (among them Pablo Picasso and Natalia Gontcharova) as well as photographers (including Man Ray and Madame D’Ora). Painter Kees Van Dongen was such a fangirl of the brand’s silhouettes that he allegedly said he was “only able to paint women in Chanel dresses.” His oil on canvas portrait of the designer from 1920 greets viewers at the top of the first stairway: she’s in a figure-hugging sky blue suit and white blouse layered with a chunky beaded necklace. Front-facing and larger-than-life, she has her hands on her hips, her hat’s cocked to the right and she dominates over a background of scampering horses.

Curator Celia Bernasconi’s aim was, as per her essay “Forming a Body,” to recreate “the experimental spirit and transdisciplinary relationships that were the order of the day.” Creative hybridity and a collaborative orbit are more longstanding than we imagine. Case in point: in 1920, after Chanel met impresario Serge Diaghilev, the man behind the Ballets Russes, his influence permeated her designs with a Slavic slant. In 1922, she launched her “Russian collection” with elaborate detailing, including an intricate fur collar-trimmed wool coat turned inside out to showcase the inverse of the Cornely machine embroidery. Beyond high concept aesthetics, Diaghilev applied a boundary-less approach between artistic disciplines. He employed Sonia Delaunay to design the costumes for Cleopatra; she later launched her own fashion house, Casa Sonia, with her signature cheerful graphic “simultaneous fabrics” in collaboration with textile designer Ilia Zdanevich (nicknamed Iliazd)—whom Chanel then hired in 1927. In a similarly transversal scenario, the 1925 season-opening ballet Le Train Bleu—for which Chanel designed the dancers’ striped bathing costumes in wool jersey, knitted wool, crêpe de chine and silk—was inspired by Picasso’s 1918 painting The Bathers, featuring three women languishing on a shoreline backgrounded by dark waters and a lighthouse. The scenario was written by Jean Cocteau and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers.

In addition to such crossovers, another central theme of the exhibition is the invention of a “Riviera style” and how it came to represent a new femininity. Bernasconi wrote she wished to explore “the female body, as it was dreamed, conceived and liberated by Coco Chanel, during a period of significant social change.” That liberation was available to a typology of thin, wealthy bodies, but that is never contextualized. In historian Amy de la Haye’s essay “Impertinent Chic: Chanel’s Resort Style,” she noted: “the 1920s became the decade of youth, health and fitness; the lithe, athletic body, fashion’s new ideal… Chanel, who was lithe and excelled at outdoor sports, was truly in her element.” Indeed, Chanel’s prizing of thinness is based on her own figure and the jaunty leisure pastimes she wrangled it into. Her designs offered women looks conceived for golf, tennis and equestrian sports, but she ultimately created these designs to meet her own needs, allegedly having said: “I invented sportswear for myself, not because other women played sport but because I did.” As Bernasconi remarked: “She was her own best publicity.”

Chanel, born in the Saumur region, came from modest origins that did not offer horse-riding or tennis lessons. She was known to have been a “raconteur” verging on a liar, and burned documents that might prove her narrative to be false. She was “discovered” in a café-concert by an upper-crust wealthy industrialist, Étienne Balzan, near Compiègne, and self-reinvention is key to her lore. Throughout her life, her image was not to be messed with: when she commissioned painter Marie Laurencin to do a portrait of her, she so thoroughly loathed the pixie dream girl version depicted that she refused to pay for the work. (Laurencin kept it and would not paint a different version. The piece, which is in the exhibition, lives at Musée de l’Orangerie.)

It was at age twenty-seven that Chanel began her designer journey as a milliner at 21 rue Cambon (a tony flagship address to this day) in Paris. Actresses wore her hats, and her designs got press attention. Building on this success, she opened her first namesake boutique in Deauville in 1912, presenting women’s sportswear and accessories. Her wealthy boyfriend at the time gave her the money for the endeavor, but she earned it back and was financially independent thereafter.

The standard practice of fashion drawings was one Chanel ignored: she cut fabrics and fitted them directly onto models’ bodies. She gravitated towards jersey, which was considered a “poor” fabric but was supple enough to enable freedom of movement for leisure activities. Building on the path set by Paul Poiret, a more comfortable, even slightly androgynous-leaning style was championed.

Chanel opened another boutique in the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte Carlo in 1914. The Principality of Monaco was (and is) considered an exclusive location; at the time, Monte Carlo’s opera house was one of the most prestigious in Europe. Chanel stayed at luxury hotels in Monaco until 1928, when she commissioned a villa up in the hills above Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. (To date, the three-story, 15,000-square-foot “pink bungalow on a five-acre olive orchard with fields of lavender” has been restored.) In a March 1930 issue of American Vogue, it’s described as “one of the most enchanting villas that ever materialized on the shores of the Mediterranean. This, one knows, is saying a good deal, for there are many properties in the South of France that are world-famous for their beauty.”

In color lithographs, the caricaturist Sem (aka Georges Victor Goursat) rendered a world of haughty women in fur stoles and sculptural hats, while the men who accompanied them had big teeth and receding hairlines belying their puffed-up finery. Jacques Henri Lartigue snapped motorboat races and seaplane flights held there. The first Women’s Olympics were organized in Monaco between 1921 and 1923, captured in fascinating black-and-white images by Jacques Enrietti in which women long jump and pose for team pictures in shorts and berets.

Chanel continually drew attention beyond the realm of fashion. In Deauville, she was sketched by the aforementioned caricaturist Sem. Two searing chromolithographs include a haggard-looking client asking a haggard-looking Gabrielle to select a hat for her, while another depicts the designer being whisked away by a centaur (meant to be her high-society equestrian English boyfriend), a striped hatbox flying behind her. In an article in April 1930, “Chanel par Colette,” the French writer profiled the designer, praising her mastery—yet nonetheless alluding to her “exasperated patience” and “despotic” eyebrows.

The exhibition concludes with Chanel evening gowns made for dancing, such as a lavishly sequined dress sported by Marion Morehouse (paired with a long string of pearls and a low chignon), photographed by Edward Steichen in May 1926. The introduction of Chanel’s perfume No 5 in 1921—followed by additional scents and a complete range of cosmetics—launched a whole lifestyle and legacy that has endured until today.

Threaded throughout are intermittent installations by contemporary French artist Chloé Royer. Twenty works—created between 2023 and 2025, ranging from prototypes extracted from a shoemaker’s workshop to bronze and enamel sculptures—serve as present-day counter-silhouettes. Royer’s works are posited as a complement to the 1920s output, but her work feels completely unnecessary to an exhibition that has a lot to reveal on its own. Still, it is thematically resonant with ideas of dissecting and analyzing the female form through Royer’s sensitive balance between force and fragility.

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