181015 – Mademoiselle Privé – London, Saatchi Gallery

To Colbert on Sloane Square for morning breakfast of ouefs briolle avec boudin noir before heading to the Saatchi Gallery for the Mademoiselle Prive Exhibition.

On the wall of the café are black and white photographs taken within a decade of World War II. We fly into a discussion about Dior and the pencil skirt and how the design came about through rationing of materials and how the fifties rebelled against this. Second we note that Paris that had not been bombed unlike Berlin or London, but instead occupied leaving many of its historical streets in tacked a fact noted in The Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne. 

Mademoiselle Privé greets the visitor with a wild flower garden has been installed outside the Gallery through which you meander whilst hearing the sounds of birdsong to the entrance, a delightful start. Sadly this is another exhibition by a Luxury brand that has little content and a huge amount of money invested. Details and textural fabrics of the couture pieces were lost in the darkness and there was a lack of descriptive information telling a story. I was hoping that there would be some insight to the Heritage of Chanel in terms of the fabrics they use, the detailing and how this has evolved throughout it’s history along with a more tactile section to get a better understanding about this. Chanel has consistently produced such incredible collections and at this exhibition we have so little access to them, so it was disappointing.

Despite my thoughts this does not appear to have deterred the public from attending as represented by the queues to get in.