Yearly Archives: 2011

Movies, The Fashion Business

The Siblings of Chopard – AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW

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The Siblings of Chopard

AFR | September 2011

by Marion Hume


Could you work with your brother or your sister? For every entrepreneur who shrugs, “Sure”, there’s another who snaps, “not until hell freezes over.”  For Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele and Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the response is, “we’ve shared an office for 25 years.” These sibling co-presidents of the Swiss watch and fine jewellery company, Chopard, are German-by-birth, Swiss by choice, (having braved the rigors of gaining a Swiss passport).

But it would be misleading to imply they have been locked in each other’s company for quarter of a century- during which time Chopard, based in a suburb of Geneva, has grown into a glittering name. “If I am in Geneva for a week, I feel I am not doing anything,” says 49-year-old Caroline, when we chat at the 64th International Cannes Film Festival. “I’m always travelling. My brother and I are very different in character and we are complementary,” she adds.

“Maybe I’m more spontaneous. He would sit more and think and analyse things.” When we meet at the Chopard Headquarters, where about 750 craftsmen are hard at work (the company employs a total of 1,700 people and has more than 120 boutiques and 1600 points of sale), her older brother concurs:  “Each of us has very specific areas where we excel.”

The Chopard story is not just a tale of two siblings, it’s a tale of two families; the Scheufeles, German goldsmiths for four generations; and the Chopards, who sold out in 1963 to Caroline and Karl-Friedrich’s parents. Chopard was established by a Swiss horologist named Louis-Ulysse Chopard in 1860 and, when it comes to watches, it turns out 75,000 a year.

I am more fascinated by Chopard’s fine jewellery, launched in 1990. And, more specifically, I’m intrigued by how soon after Uma Thurman’s apperance at the opening night of the Cannes film festival the cascades of emeralds she wore on her ears were sold. (Answer, first serious interest logged within minutes of her appearance, sale concluded the following morning. “And we could have sold them five or six times,” says Caroline of these red carpet one-offs that sold for €270,000.)

By now, it is lunchtime at Cannes. Elegant women, some looking a little the worse for wear after a Chopard-sponsored glittering after-screen beach party the night before, are nibbling on the chilled seafood pasta, served buffet-style on the penthouse terrace of Hotel Martinez. For those whose surnames do not end in Thurman, De Niro, Pitt or indeed Jolie-Pitt, this is where EVERYONE stays during the festival. It’s where you hop into the lift as the doors are closing, say “press seven please for the Chopard lounge,” only then to realise your lift operator is Oscar winner, Adrian Brody.

While Chopard has a presence at the Academy Awards as well as the French Cesars amd the British BAFTAs- and now, thanks to a current push into Australia, is targeting the AFIs as well- it is here at Cannes that the brand has pulled off its greatest coup. While no single commercial brand is particularly associated with the Oscars and the statuette, designed by an MGM studio art director remains almost unchanged since 1929, Chopard designs The Palme d’Or trophy.

Another prestigious Cannes award, presented each year by the biggest star in town to the young actor and actress who show outstanding promise, is called the Trophée Chopard. (Audrey “Amelie” Tautou, and Marion Cotillard are just two winners who have worn “lucky” Chopard jewellery ever since).

These close associations with the film festival have given the brand unequalled muscle on the Cannes red carpet, the scene of not one big night, but twelve. All this promotion comes at considerable cost (how considerable, no one in this private company will say). That it reaps rewards caused London’s Financial Times to highlight Chopard for its soft-sell “masterclass in the art of celebrity endorsement”.

The top floor of Hotel Martinez enjoys a sweeping view along La Croisette to the Palais des Festivals – as long as you can get past the squadron of security guards. Up here, there’s a beauty salon, a nail bar, a chill-out room, complete with both Grey Goose vodka bar and a bank of TV monitors, on which a montage of images of movie star plus Caroline Scheufele, movie star runs on an exhausting loop.

Outside on the terrace, a band, wittily titled The Gypsy Queens provides live music. As a visual centre piece, there is a pair of bejewelled stilettos under glass, billed as “the world’s most expensive shoes”, these the result of a collaboration with Italian shoe-maker, Guiseppe Zanotti. They are in such a small size that when Caroline Scheufele bounds onto the terrace to greet me, I look first at her tiny feet.

I have already decided I like Gruosi-Scheufele, who looks bright as a button, given she is the first (co-) president I have ever encountered whose PA has said, “she never does interviews before noon”. “I’m a night bird, I’m a natural party person,” she says as I take in flawless diamond earrings so massive (5 carat), that on anyone else, I would assume them to be fake. “They have no weight, diamonds have no weight, only gold has weight,” she tells me as she leads me to the VIP area of this already decidedly VIP terrace atop a VIP hotel (by now, I’ve cleared five security checks, three of which are operated by the hotel to keep fans at bay).

Through French doors, I can spy what must then be correctly called the VVVIP suite, where bodyguards protect a client from the Middle East who is being shown an emerald necklace. Of course, I’m supposed to be conducting an interview, not clocking a customer via eyes in the back of my head. But it certainly seems that, in the time it takes me to ask Scheufele a bit about her life in the family firm, a deal is reaching its conclusion. “Is that lady just looking?” I say, feigning innocence. “Buying,” Caroline confirms.

“Sometimes, we sell to the [movie star] who [has borrowed something for the red carpet]. I think it works when the celebrity is first of all choosing what she likes to wear and what she would wear anyway. Then it’s a natural thing. Sometimes, we sell to other clients who like what they saw.”

“But if that lady were a movie star, wouldn’t you give it for free?” I push.“Of course it happens I like to give presents because that would be an honour for the house. It means that people are really appreciating what we do. But they also buy. Jude Law was talking to me yesterday. He said he really liked his watch, and as he’s happy to wear it, he will buy it.” Behind her head, the Middle Eastern lady and her entourage prepare to leave. The necklace is sold.

The Cannes Film Festival has become a truly international gathering of the glam clan. While the late Liz Taylor was a paying customer, the lion’s share of jewellery purchasing power lies now in the Middle East and the BRICS economies, from whence plenty of wealthy customers, with just scant interest in the movies, show up for festival fortnight in their superyachts. There are other jewellers, with pop up shops along La Croisette  and selling suites in smart hotels, but what is beyond debate is that Chopard is in the lead here, ever since, some 15 years ago, Caroline Scheufele took herself to Paris to meet with the festival president.

“I said to myself, I’m a cinema lover and that’s how the whole thing started.” That said, her personal taste in film, perhaps similar to that of many guests of sponsors who get the most-prized tickets to evening premieres, does not parallel those movies chosen  to screen in competition, of which this year’s Australian entry, Sleeping Beauty was far from the most bleak and disturbing. Caroline’s favourite recent movie? “I liked that one with Julia Roberts in Bali….”

The Chopard HQ, just outside Geneva, betrays no hint of glamour. When you arrive at a cluster of squat grey buildings, the first thing they do is take away your passport. Inside, it is unexpected- that is if you expected the place where they kit out Jane Fonda, Kate Winslet, Carlize Theron, Penelope Cruz to movie-star fabulous. It turns out this place is fabulous, but in a different, hi-industrial kind of way.

After being ushered past enough steel rods, forged in Japan, to support a Shanghai skyscraper (here used to make watches), there is a machine so enormous that it looks like it should have been delivered instead to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on the nearby Franco-Swiss border.

So perhaps it’s the scale of the next machine that I like: for in contrast, it is about equal to that of a top-loading ‘nana’ washing machine, (one of those cylindrical ones you had to drag out on wheels and then put the hose pipe out the window). This one is for smelting gold. Some 12 tonnes of it (current spot price, $US52,000 a kilo) is delivered here each year from the nearby UBS vaults. Hardly any jewellers smelt their own gold. Chopard does because, as my guide puts it, “it means we control baking the perfect cake.”

So in goes a bit of copper for a rosy hue, a bit of palladium, a sprinkling of pure silver for strength and then a pile of 24-carat ingots, which are much smaller than those bricks of bullion villains steal in heist movies. The machine heats up to 1,000 degrees. There’s a viewfinder on the top. But what you see through it looks less how you might expect molten gold to look, (my reference; chocolate ads on TV) and more like the view through the Hubble Telescope to Mars. Weird. Wonderful.

Inside the fine jewellery workshop, a craftsman is tweaking the beaks of a pair of jewel-encrusted humming birds, each hovering over a diamond earring. Another holds the empty casement of a dress ring containing a massive 102-carat sapphire secured on a mount full of tiny holes, each of which will be filled with marquise diamonds. Then there’s the strand of 133 perfect South Sea Pearls. When I ask if I might try it on, it weighs me down like a yoke. “We will make the setting very light, with diamonds,” says a master craftsman.

Karl-Friedrich Scheufele meets me in the Chopard museum, which houses 18th century pocket watches and (bizarre this), a fully-stocked bar. While he shares twinkling nut-brown eyes with his sister, his gestures are smaller. Yes, he’s content with running a business in Switzerland, “although our  currency is quite strong at the moment and it may become more difficult for us in the next 6-8 months.”

Yes, he’s content with how Chopard is navigating these tough times, “although as we work with our own capital, certainly in our case, we are very careful.” And actually, he is glad his parents did not change the company name to Scheufele, “because we want our product to be the hero. We want people to believe in our brand name, respect it, cherish it. We as a family are not so important. We’re not really so keen about personal publicity.”

What Karl-Friedrich is obsessed by is provenance; a potentially sticky subject if you deal in gems. While the transit of diamonds is now tightly-controlled, it remains relatively simple to smuggle, say, banned Burmese rubies into the Thai supply chain. Karl-Friedrich aims to make Chopard completely transparent, pretty much from rock to ring, and the company is two-years into a three-year process to achieve that. “To be frank, this is not what our customers are asking us yet. But we must ask,” he says.

As to where those customers are, a growing number are in cities he’s still not sure how to pronounce, such as the Chinese coal-rich city of Urumqi. Australia is also on the radar for expansion, where the company hopes to stake a claim to both local custom and the upper end of the tourist market.

But there’s one family question i’ve yet to ask. Did these siblings have any choice of career? Karl-Friedrich pauses. “At one point, I wanted to pick up art as a main study in university. But then I entered into a jewelry apprenticeship and saw that it was also interesting and slowly but surely I found my way to the company.”Caroline has answered the same question at Cannes. “I would have liked to become a singer maybe,” she said, gazing over the Cote d’Azur. “Ballet was also something that I loved. But I had a choice. If my father had been producing lorries or cars, for sure, I would not be there.”

Designers

Giorgio Armani – The Sunday Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph | September 2011

For Decades, Giorgio Armani has remained Loyal to A philosophy of Shape And Tailoring this season’s collection of suits is true to form.

by Marion Hume

‘Silhouettes must evolve slowly, so that an upcoming season never renders the one that has gone before redundant. Fabrics must be both sensual to touch yet tough enough to endure.’

Such sound sartorial sense may sound like the latest quote from a minimalist such as Celine’s Phoebe Philo. But it was Giorgio Armani who said this in 1991, when I interviewed him for a BBC TV series called The Look. Judging by e-mails  I’ve been receiving since 10 magazine posted links to is on an online blog, The Look is currently gathering an audience of those barely born when it was new. Amazingly Armani’s clothes still look current- adjust the shoulder pads a little and his jackets could walk off the screen and out onto the street without looking remotely ‘vintage’.

As a combination of great tailoring and good taste returns to the centre of fashion, it is Giorgio Armani’s turn yet again, and the 77-year-old’s collections have been garnering rave reviews. While those who work within the Armani universe, headquartered in a palazzo in Milan, might argue Commendatore Armani has stayed in style since the label was launched in 1975, his understated refinements of the jacket, first for men, then, in 1976, for women, have been both fashionable and, inevitably, less so in turn over the years. There have certainly been times when the designer himself has criticised the competition as ‘motlo porno’ or ‘‘troppo Joan Collins’. Now, he might argue, the rest of us have returned to our senses.

What is also certain is that at no point has the Giorgio Armani brand-its start-up costs funded by the sale of a Volkswagen Beetle-ever stopped advancing hence a fortune which Forbes puts at $7bn (March 2011). The Armani empire is now vast, comprising sleek stores around the globe, underpants promoted via the buff body of Rafael Nadal, hotel rooms, even chocolates…Yet the central pillar that supports it all is a jacket, created by this architect of the power suit, who, paradoxically, changed the way men and women dress for work by knocking the stiffness clean out of it.

‘Jackets had a rigidity that made them awkward to wear’, he says of the mid-Seventies. ‘My idea was to take them apart, then put them together again, removing the structure, the padding and the lining reconfiguring them with all the easy comfort of a knitted cardigan.’

Today Giorgio Armani stands as a style colossus, the creator of a democratic uniform which cuts across class and geographical divides. Of course, it requires substantial cash to own a real Armani (slightly less for Emporio Armani), but his influence is writ large even on those imitations where the colour and the weave of the fabric have nothing like his subtlety and quality.

‘After my first collection for men, my sister and her friends asked me to design similarly deconstructed but impeccably cut jackets for them as well,’ he says today, explaining the genesis of his signature look. ‘I went on to offer women an alternative to clothes that imprisoned them in a confined ‘baby doll’ role.’

I saw my first Armani show in the mid-Eighties and I was blown away by the unadorned beauty. But as more seasons of beige perfection went by, the impact inevitably diminished. At the time, his understated and elegant approach was also in stark contrast to the ostentatious sexiness of one of his closer neighbours, and the press delighted in comparing Giorgio (northern Italian, sedate) with Gianni Versace (southern and then at the height of his women-as-courtesan obsession).

But Armani insists that tailoring can seduce, and that his is ‘a sensuality that is hinted at, never shouted out loud’. He explains: ‘When I design a suit, I like to give it a sexy edge, firstly through the choice of fabric, but most importantly through the balance of proportion and volume that often reveals the beauty of a woman”s anatomy better than nudity.’

From the vantage point of Armani’s autumn/winter 2011 reviews, this may seem credible, but 25 years ago it was easy to see him as an austere perfectionist. Stories circulated in the press of his obsession, like how he insisted the hangers in his stores were always exactly the same distance apart. Now we are used to the attention to detail of Tom Ford and Burberry’s Christopher Bailey, that sounds so fashion-normal. Sadly, back then, the fashion press was so busy refined in front of our eyes was a category piece that would stand the test of time alongside Chanel tailleur and the YSL tux. And then came Hollywood.

Armani was the first to assess the massive brand-building potential of the red-carpet, back when Cher was in feathers, Meryl Streep in some gown she brought on the way to the ceremony and Jodie Foster on the ‘worst-dressed’ list. In the space of a year, Armani moved in and Foster was ‘best-dressed’ in a beaded tuxedo and the US magazine W replaced its famous ‘In/Out’ list by one headed ‘Armani/Armani Not’. Kim Basinger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Diana Ross, Angelica Huston, Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford and Robert De Niro all wore Armani.

That Armani always appeals to grown-ups may, of course, be due to the fact that he was 40 in 1975 when he launched his own label along with his partner Sergio Galeotti (who died in 1985). While it was his self-taught talent, refined first as a window-dresser, then as a freelance designer, that set Armani style agenda from day one, the fact that the company earned $1m in its first year was largely down to Galeotti’s business acumen and considerable chutzpah.

By 1976, Fred Pressman, who was at the helm of Barney’s New York, tracked the pair down via the Milan telephone directory. By 1977, the Giorgio Armani label was being stocked on America’s West Coast, too, attracting the attention of screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was working on a follow-up to Taxi-Driver that would centre on a male escort. Would Armani be interested in costuming John Travolta? Then Travolta pulled out of American Gigolo. Enter a young buck called Richard Gere.

1n 2000, two decades after the film’s eventual release, at the opening of a 25-year Giorgio Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim, New York, I wandered into a side gallery where clips from the many movies for which Armani has designed the clothes over the years were played on a loop. And there was Richard Gere, grey around the temples, still gorgeous, watching his cocky younger self in fashion’s number-one-all-time-favourite film clip- working out what Armani shirt, what Armani tie, goes with what. It’s the most glamourous image of a man getting ready to go to work.

The interesting this is Giorgio Armani will probably be remembered for creating a new wardrobe for the working woman. ‘Throughout the Seventies, I saw women establishing their right to a personal status beyond the family environment, often in a professional capacity,’ he says. ‘At that time, they did not have an aesthetic model to emulate. My aim was to find a positive sartorial solution to this problem, adapting certain elements of the male wardrobe, softening the lines and aiming for a balance between precision and delicacy. In short, I was determined to provide clothes for a new kind of woman.’ So this was fashion as a social statement? ‘It is all a long time ago, but there can be no doubting the significance of my small revolution concerning the jacket.‘

Back in 1991, in the interview for The Look, he said, ‘The jacket obscures, the jacket suggests. It’s mysterious. It’s protection, a shield, a kind of armour to help you survive modern life. A dress reveals too much. You see a woman in a dress, you know how she is made. The jacket conceals and gives you shape.’ This season’s elegant offerings make it obvious that the maestro of minimalism still stands by that.

The Fashion Business

Cruising with Chanel – AFR

 

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Cruising with Chanel

AFR | September 2011

Staging fashion shows in glamorous venues is par for the premier course for haute Parisian labels but the house of Chanel does have especial affinity with the perfumed air around Antibes. Where better, than, for Marion Hume to meet the man responsible for its extravaganzas?

Bruno Pavlovsky just may have the coolest business card on the planet. It is white of course, with the words, “CHANEL 29­31 Rue Cambon, 75001 Paris”, in inky black sans serif type in the lower right ­hand corner; those essentials of telephone, fax and email in the lower left. Centered and below his name, is his job title; président des activités mode (president of fashion activities), Chanel. How cool is that?

Pavlovsky himself is easy­breezy, even though we meet on a particularly busy day. He is relaxed of style: dark trousers, white shirt, cashmere sweater slung just so over his shoulders. On meeting him, I am slightly stunned, for I had been anticipating an uptight guy in a tie doing a job that involves cajoling and containing the genius that is Karl Lagerfeld (the face of all things Chanel since 1983), as well as being one of very few public spokesmen for a private company that is possibly the world’s most successful fashion empire.

That empire is controlled by Alain and Gerard Wertheimer, whose grandfather Pierre co-­founded Chanel. Alain chairs the group, while Gerard chairs the watch division The brothers, who are worth an estimated $US6 billion never give interviews about the brand, although they’ve been known to show up at Chanel shows, sneaking into seats in the third or fourth rows. Pavlovsky is a row­ one kind of guy. Along with global chief executive Maureen Chiquet and Lagerfeld, he is one of the few who give voice to a brand whose ‘double­-C’ logo is recognised anywhere on earth.

As to where on earth he and I are meeting, do let me set that scene. It was supposed to be Paris, at his office in rue Cambon, a narrow, dark street where Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel opened a little shop in 1910. But it turns out the only window in Pavlovsky’s diary is on the afternoon before the Chanel cruise show, the location for which is the Hôtel du Cap, Eden Roc, Cap D’Antibes on the French Riviera. Yeah, I know, sometimes this job is a chore.

The hotel itself is a wedding cake confection of such grand gorgeousness, it is little wonder it was a favourite of  Picasso, Chagall and Edward & Mrs Simpson. It was immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel “Tender is the Night”, in which a character called Nicole, “crosses herself reverently with Chanel sixteen” – an in-joke because, although there have been far more Chanel fragrances than you might guess – incdlung Nos. 1, 2,  7 , 9, 11, 14, both 18 and 19 which still exist, 20, 21, 27, 46, 55 as well as , of course No. 5, there has never been a No.16.

Today’s fragrance offer includes a dozen “exclusifs de Chanel”, of which 28 La Pausa is named for the white marble villa Chanel had her lover, Bendor, Duke of Westminster, build for her at Roquebrune Cap Martin, further along this breathtakingly beautiful coastline. The company is whispered to have just acquired La Pausa. The villa was certainly for sale recently at an asking price of €11.2 million ($14.6 million).

The Riviera plays such an important part in the story of Chanel. Near here is Grasse, the hilltop town where Chanel No. 5 was born from ingredients including an especially heady jasmine and a complex and intensely-scented rose, the centifolia, also known as rose de mai. It was here on the Riviera in the Christmas vacation of 1920, that Coco Chanel first spritzed a little vial of this innovative concoction around her table at a restaurant in Cannes. Other diners, walking past, were enraptured. Thus, five months before its official debut, did an advertising campaign begin that has carried on to this day, thanks to the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve, Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tautou.

Down here by the sea, Coco was among the first to come up with the notion of sporty holiday clothes; when it comes to mixing stripes and palazzo pants, our debt is to her.  This holiday category, which the French call croisiere and the the rest of us ‘cruise’, really caught hold in America in the 1970s, when designers started offering extra clothes for wealthy clients heading to Florida, the Med or to cruise ships to escape the winter.  Bruno Pavlovsky makes a good-natured play for tracing the history, definitively, to Coco. “Chanel liked to design for some very specific people, targeting the cruise and the boats. She developed some very specific clothes for lovely places.”

Cruise collections, though they garner less press attention than those huge ready-to-wear extravaganzas revealed in Paris twice a year, are far more profitable. As ever with the Chanel empire, no one will provide figures, but industry analysts estimate Cruise accounts for more than 70% of clothing sales for the brand worldwide. Reasons include the longest selling season (cruise pieces stay available in store from December until the following June), designs more suited for real life; slightly more affordable price points; and perhaps most importantly, styles and fabrics that work in places where the weather differs from France-in other words, the new boom economies and Australia.

“Cruise is a very popular and successful collection in our local market,” says David Blakeley, the managing director for Chanel Australia and New Zealand, whom I reach by email. “Given it is our summertime when it launches in-store, the collection has become one of our most successful. Light knitwear, casual evening wear and beautiful summer fabrics are geared for a hot climate guaranteeing our clients have something suitable to select for their Christmas and New Year holidays.” As to why Blakeley is not present at the show for the launch of the clothes that will drive his region’s sales, there’s rather a lot happening on his local watch. “So unfortunately, even with today’s technology, I’m unable to be in all places at once,” he jokes.

Indeed, it is because Chanel is expanding in Australia that Bruno Pavlovsky has said “yes” to my request for an interview. We chat on the movie descending the hotel’s blond stone staircase to a pathway lined with palms leading down to a beachside restaurant, which looks like the deck of an ocean liner cantilevered out over the azure sea. As we go, technicians, video operators, the guys rigging up the lights-all members of the large-yet-tight Chanel team working like clockwork-stop to shake Pavlovsky’s hand.

Between the cameraderie, Pavlovsky is telling me about the growing importance of  croisiere, which used to be shown only to store buyers and has now become an annual travelling show. In the past, Chanel Cruise shows have been staged as far afield as Santa Monica on a private airfield. (In this Chanel is not alone. Last year, Dior staged a lavish cruise show on the Bund in Shanghai, although the sacking of John Galliano in March meant there was no such extravaganza this year). Yet in recent years, celebrations have been in places that are part of the brand’s DNA; Saint-Tropez last year, Antibes this time around, to sum up the free spirit of Coco.

The brand made its debut in Australia right back in 1922, with, predictably, the arrival of Chanel No.5, which has continued to be shipped across the world, flacon by cut glass square flacon ever since. It was not until well into the “Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel years” that a boutique opened here, in 1989, at the same Castlereagh Street, Sydney, site it occupies today. This underwent a complete redesign in 2000 and will close at the end of this year for a radical renovation before reopening in Autumn 2012. The Melbourne store on Collins Street that first opened in 2001 will also be renovated.

Then there’s Chanel in the mall. Back in 2007, when word went out that Chanel would open in Westfield Bondi Junction, there was disbelief, (“Chanel! In the Junga?”), yet the success of a fragrance and beauty store  lead to the opening of an even higher-end fashion boutique in 2009. In the same year, the brand made its debut in the luxury precinct of Victoria’s Chadstone mall. This month sees a fragrance and beauty store opening at The Star development in Sydney’s casino complex.

Coming up in October and after a six-year search for appropriate locations, Chanel heads North to Queensland, with two stand-alone boutiques in Brisbane’s Queens Plaza where Blakeley predicts that sunglasses will prove especially popular.  Back in Sydney, there will be a pop-up boutique in Westfield’s City complex while the Castlereagh Street store is closed. (There has also long been a significant Chanel presence in the cosmetics departments of both David Jones and Myer as well as selected pharmacies.

This quintessentially Parisian brand has earned the love it receives in the Australian market. Unlike other big brands that first showed up here with last season’s European leftovers, (it used to happen), Chanel has always treated far-flung loyalists to the same season on the same delivery schedule worldwide. “As a brand, Chanel delivers product launches to a global calendar,” says Blakeley.  “Given our climate is the reverse of the French seasons, the Fashion Buying Manager works to a very specific ‘collection buy’ per each boutique. This ensures each collection in store offers every client a varied choice for their international travel, plus their local needs.”

Pavlovsky he says he’s thrilled by all this Aussie action. “It’s the right thing for us, the right time for us. We are ready to expand and we have a strong expansion [program],” he says with excitement.  By now, the pair of us are still only half way down the gravel slope to the sea where we sit for a moment on ’50s-style white wire patio chairs with blue cushions that matching the sea’s colour. These do not belong to the hotel. Along with matching parasols, they have been shipped in for the show tonight, such is Chanel’s exacting level of perfection in all things.

It seems the moment to ask Pavlovsky why Chanel is not in fashion’s biggest global marketplace-online. That you cannot buy a Chanel suit from an e-tailer seems rather quaint. “You have to go a boutique,” he replies, at first sounding like those doubters did a decade ago when predicting net-a-porter’s swift demise. However he follows with, “My feeling is that one day we go online. But we are not going yet. Our product is sophisticated and we need to be with our customer. I do believe in fashion online, yes. But Chanel is perfection and for that, for now, you need to go to a boutique”.

So there are no Chanel clothes, no scarves, no shoes, officially, at e-tail (which gives you a big clue that, yes, that too-good-to-be-true classic Chanel padded leather 2.55 bag on e-Bay is likely to be a fake). “We are very active online,” Pavlovsky stresses. “We are not selling fashion online, but we are doing something with [the web] and…we are, at the moment, doing more and more. We have a lot of digital initiatives.” Indeed, click on to chanel.com and should you want to study the every waking thought of Karl Lagerfeld (and be warned, he only sleeps a few hours a night), there’s plenty to persuade you to linger.

Yet not selling the clothes online is beginning to look less luddite,  indeed rather smart (like those smug in the knowledge that never having been on Facebook is right in the long run). Much of the charm of Chanel lies in the weave of the cloth, the beauty of the finish. More than 80 % of the clothing is made in France,  the rest in Italy and Scotland while accessories are made in France and Italy.

From 1985, Chanel began buying up small suppliers, thus ensured the survival of little maisons making fabric flowers, buttons, costume jewellery and the signature two-tone pumps in beige and black designed by mademoiselle in 1957 with specialist shoemakers Massaro. Chanel also owns the high-end swimwear company Eres, the gunmaker Holland & Holland (which carries a small range of specific sporting clothing); and it has a stake in the luxury watchmaker, Bell & Ross.

“We have developed something very specific for our customer,” says Pavlovsky. “It’s the only way to be able to supply such a quality of products. It takes so long to be able to reach our level. I would rather work with these small companies, [which are] very focused on the protection of their know-how,” he adds. Perhaps surprisingly, a complete knowledge of the intricacies of every step of its supply chain means that one of global fashion’s most expensive brands may thus be one of the greenest. But Pavlovsky is wary of any boasting on that score. “We are taking [sustainability programs] step by step and, for that reason, we are not talking…” He pauses, as if he were tempted to tell me more, then stops. “It is too early. Shall we walk?”

Ahead of us now is the seaside terrace with its view of a huge saltwater swimming pool dynamited out of the rocks. “Our story is of this location, the décor. The Riviera was always so inspiring for Chanel,” Pavlovsky is saying, “and the weather is everything; it is perfect here. And Karl Lagerfeld, you know that Mr Largerfeld loves this region.”  Ah yes, Mr. Lagerfeld, who spends August in the South of France [he has a villa near Saint-Tropez]. And here he is, enjoying a light, late lunch (leafy salads, tiny artichokes). Pavlovsky approaches. I watch, but can’t work out who is schmoozing whom.

It is said that Karl Lagerfeld has a lifetime contract at Chanel. It is said, by Lagerfeld himself, that he gets to choose his successor. (The current front runner, tipped by the designer last November, is the rising star Haider Ackermann). But as to when Lagerfeld might stand down, who knows? Like Coco herself, he enjoys keeping his date of birth shady, meaning he may or may not be the fashion world’s most senior world famous designer: he disputes a birth date of 1933, preferring 1938, while Giorgio Armani admits to being born in 1934. But Pavlovsky is far too smart to let me even begin to get anywhere with speculation, instead wheeling talk around to how amazing it is to work with Karl etc., etc.,

The President des Activites Mode has no family connection with fashion. “When I was a kid, I had no idea. I would surf and dive. I’m used to living [outdoors]: a lot of sport and all these kind of things, a more Australian kind of life, I suppose,” he muses. “Now I know fashion very well, and I like fashion and of course working with Karl.”  I know, had we met in an office above a dark street in Paris as planned, I’d have got more out of him at this point; what brought him to this role, his past, his parents and maybe even his hopes for the future. But the thing is, the surroundings are so distracting.

Over our heads is a sea-diving board and is that really an enormous disco ball hanging out over the sea? At the end of a jetty stretching out into the bright blue water, a lone security guard is standing muscles bristling, legs akimbo. It is so 007-glamourous (and indeed, past guests at the hotel include a James Bond trifecta of Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan and the peerless Sean Connery) that I spend my last few minutes with Chanel’s smooth President joking that the speedboat that is approaching right now must be booked for my departure. (It is not. I have to wait for the photographer. Then it takes us so long to get back to our hotel, we have about 40 seconds before we have to get out again).

It is early evening. The photographer and I, speedily scrubbed up, suited and booted, are back at the imposing front entrance of Hotel du Cap where, (bless him) the concierge who we have met earlier in the day dives forward with “Madame! How glamourous you look!”  (The hotel’s starting price of 680 euros a night is seeming ever-more reasonable). How glamourous do we feel as we are escorted by young men in tennis whites, past Vanessa Paradis and Gossip Girl, Blake Lively to one of the parasoled picnic tables, where we wait for the fading of the light and the show to begin.

Off to the side and silhouetted against the sea, I spot Lagerfeld, perhaps thinking he is unobserved (the ponytail is the giveaway). Close at hand, although all but concealed behind a giant spiky plant, I can make out Pavlovsky.

I’m a veteran of Chanel shows and I have not always been kind. Yet this one is a delight with its billowing evening gowns, wide palazzo pants and simple sweaters which seem to encapsulate the casual glamour of Coco Chanel herself, although one doubts even she would have worn diamonds so recklessly with strapless swimwear. After the show, as the sun sets, we head to the beach bar terrace now furnished with white loungers and fire pits.

All chat is praise halted when a cinema screen pops up from behind a rock, a short film by Lagerfeld is screened and then, just as swiftly, the screen disappears and there’s Brian Ferry on stage. I do not spot Pavlovsky on the dance floor smooching to Avalon or doing an air guitar solo during Love is the Drug so I have no chance to shout a final question; whether he thinks the rumoured €3 million this is all costing the House of Chanel is worth it. Clearly the hand-picked audience think it money well spent. But in any case, even if I could find Pavlovsky in the moonlight, I know the answer “Chanel is a private company. We never talk about the figures,” he’d say.