Coco Chanel was an ambitious woman, but even she could not have imagined the scale on which the house she founded now operates. This time last year, four blocks of Manchester’s Northern Quarter became a Chanel catwalk. For its final show of 2024, Chanel built a black wooden catwalk spanning the West Lake in Hangzhou, China, to parade this season’s tweed suits with the kiss-curl roof of a pagoda sitting atop a crescent moon bridge over glassy water as a dramatic backdrop.

The 6,000-mile journey from Manchester to Hangzhou reflects the global expansion of Chanel, the second-largest luxury brand in the world. With global revenue reaching $19.7bn in 2023, a rise of 16% on the previous year, Chanel is closing the gap on leaders Louis Vuitton.

The show was the most lavish moment in an ongoing love-bombing campaign by Chanel aimed at reigniting desire among Chinese consumers, where the luxury market is in slowdown. More than half of the 1,000 guests were top-spending Chinese clients. Such a high-rolling audience is not easily impressed, but few were immune to the flex of the journey by liveried barge, which carried guests to seats on a floating stage. In the heart of one of China’s seven ancient capitals, illuminations set the lake ablaze with colour, and to the boom of traditional Chinese drums, models began to traverse the slender catwalk to the stage. At the after-show party, a queue developed next to the Chanel sign, as guests lined up to take selfies.

The origin story of this collection was Coco Chanel’s enchantment with 19th-century Chinese lacquered Coromandel screens, of which her favourite screen, displayed in her study in her Rue Cambon apartment in Paris, showed a map of Hangzhou, which sits 170km south-west of Shanghai, dotted with pagodas, temples and bridges.

The film-maker Wim Wenders, who made for Chanel a short film starring Tilda Swinton to tell the story of the collection online, described the screen as “an amazingly exact description of the city itself”. The collection began with several outfits in black, the screen’s background colour. Later, dresses came in jade green and gold foil, to echo the Coromandel colour palette.

“Imagination is part of creativity. We use imagination to keep a connection with our friends in China, at a time when business [there] is a bit more difficult,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, said before the show. He added: “Chanel has had a dialogue with China for many years, and it is not just about selling to China. We buy a lot, too. Most of our silk and cashmere comes from China. That is nothing to do with price, it is because it is the best quality.”

The hottest topic of conversation at the show was the one thing that Chanel, for all their bombast, lack: a designer. Creative director at Chanel, the holy grail of fashion positions, has been vacant since the abrupt departure of Virginie Viard six months ago. Pavlovsky said the search was “in a good position” and hinted at an announcement “in the coming weeks”. He did not confirm rumours that Matthieu Blazy, designer at the insider-favourite Milanese brand of Bottega Veneta, will be appointed from a field of contenders which has included more famous names such as Marc Jacobs and Hedi Slimane. But he suggested that Chanel would not chase a celebrity name, emphasising that “this job is about Chanel, not about the artistic director. Some artistic directors work for a brand, some work for themselves. We want someone who works for the brand”.

This collection was designed by a studio team. “Virginie was not alone. Karl was not alone, the next creative director will not work alone. There is a strong team at Chanel,” said Pavlovsky.

The messaging was about honouring Chinese fashion heritage while weaving Chanel into the story. Hangzhou flourished as a silk production hub on the Silk Road, during a period when silk and porcelain were synonymous with Chinese savoir-faire and luxury, and is resurgent in modern China as a hub for tech companies including Alibaba. The sharp pleats of an ivory silk cocktail dress made by Lognon, an atelier of specialised pleaters, referenced China’s famous folding fans, which were a favourite accessory of Coco herself. Strings of pearls nodded in two directions, being emblematic of China and Paris. Tweeds were dotted with water lilies, delicately embroidered to float on the surface. Quilted jackets echoed the famous square stitching of Chanel’s handbags, while also shadowing the silhouette of the traditional boxy quilted jackets still worn by many older Chinese women.

The Metiers d’Art collection, a showcase for craftsmanship in fashion, spotlights the skills of the embroiderers, feather-workers, glove-makers, goldsmiths and other specialist ateliers, and is held in a different city each December. More than 800 craftspeople worked on this collection. “Those people and their skills are the true value of luxury,” said Pavlovsky.

China has been a primary growth driver in the luxury industry in recent decades, but a post-pandemic spending spree has stalled, while fractious trading relations with the US have led to an uptick in desire for local brands among shoppers who previously favoured western luxury names.

Luxury brands can no longer take the Chinese market for granted. Luxury is not protected from the rest of the economy when there is an economic crisis, so this is an important moment to reconnect.” Pavlovsky noted that when Chanel staged a smaller catwalk show in Hong Kong last month, the two weeks after the show brought the brand’s best ever sales in the territory.