It’s that time of the year again – the world is abound with festivity as pubs reopen across the UK, stores pack in their hoards of forgetful shoppers, and Chanel rolls out the red carpet for their ultra-lux Métiers D’Art collection. The out of season show happens every year, and seeks to pay tribute to all the vehicles in fashion whom, without, Chanel’s commitment to fashion would be impossible.

With us being starved of any semblance of normality for the last few months, and it being the second Métiers D’Art show since Karl Lagerfeld’s passing, the stakes were exorbitantly raised for 2020/21. Would Virginie Viard save us from the chaos of coronavirus? We reckon so.

Taking place in Loire Valley’s Château de Chenonceau, the collection’s location was an immediately obvious choice for the house’s creative director. “It was designed and lived in by women, including Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de’ Medici. It is a castle on a human scale. And Catherine de’ Medici’s emblem was a monogram composed of two intertwined Cs, just like that of Chanel,” she explains.

Checkerboard was the choice print of the occasion, lining the floor of the runway like a human chessboard and appearing, albeit more glitterfied, on slinky mini skirts, clutch bags and one rather mouth-watering deconstructed tweed number. The monochrome frenzy continued throughout, sprawled across voluminous trenches in herringbone print or crisscrossed a dress comprised of meticulously crafted beads – no garment or accessory left without its colour contrasting partner.

But what else? Of course, Viard included the house’s beloved shades baby pink, cream and blue that cropped up on their exquisitely tailored suit jackets and various other accoutrements, boasted the skills of the house’s expert embroiderers on beaded bodices, and gave us a masterclass in melodrama with the collection’s boatload of scene-starting coats, all fitted with trains bigger than the entire continent of Europe.

If you don’t mind us, it appears we’ll be focusing our attention on becoming global superstars overnight, only in the hopes we might actually get to don a few of these works of art ourselves… Vive Chanel!