A visionary dialogue between fashion, art, and society comes to life at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco with Les Années folles de Coco Chanel. For the first time, the exhibition explores the influence of the Côte d’Azur on Gabrielle Chanel’s creative practice during the Roaring Twenties, featuring over 200 works including garments, accessories, photographs, and paintings.
Coco Chanel’s portrait, 1920
On display, some thirty Chanel creations – daywear, evening dresses, and accessories –converse with works by leading avant-garde artists such as Picasso, Delaunay, Goncharova, Laurencin, and Cocteau, illustrating the close affinity between fashion and visual art in shaping new expressions of female freedom and modernity.
Curated by Célia Bernasconi, the exhibition unfolds in three thematic sections. The first, Outdoor Living, traces the emergence of a style conceived for seaside leisure, from Deauville to Biarritz to Monte-Carlo. Here, Chanel reimagines women’s wardrobes with simple, comfortable silhouettes inspired by her own athletic lifestyle.
The second section, dedicated to the Ballets Russes and Slavic influences, delves into the designer’s cultural and personal ties to the Russian world, from her friendship with Diaghilev to her relationship with Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov. The third section, The Riviera Style, reveals how the French Riviera – and particularly her villa La Pausa – offered Chanel the perfect setting to refine a new aesthetic: elegant, pared-down, and unmistakably modern.
Enhancing this narrative, artist Chloé Royer presents Of Limbs and Other Things, a sculptural series that evokes absent bodies, a poetic echo of Chanel’s sartorial gesture, as she famously shaped garments directly on women’s bodies.
More than a fashion exhibition, Les Années folles de Coco Chanel is a cultural tableau that reconstructs the creative ferment of the 1920s and the central role of women within it. A tribute to Chanel’s genius and her enduringly radical vision of freedom.
