Paris Fashion Week AW24: Chanel serves big hat energy as Gigi Hadid owns the runway

Big hats are in, according to Chanel’s Paris Fashion Week show. Models walked the runway for the AW24 collection wearing oversized floppy sun hats in black hues and pastel colours, adorned with silver pins.

This wasn’t the only bit of interesting headgear on the runway –  models also wore tartan flat caps.

It’s an interesting addition for the French fashion house, as flat caps are thought to have originated in England, and have long been associated with British and Irish fashion.

Supermodel Gigi Hadid – a regular face on the Chanel runway – was one of the few models who wasn’t wearing a hat.

She wore an all-black outfit: a turtleneck and semi-sheer long skirt with a skinny belt and plenty of gold jewellery. Her head wasn’t entirely bare, as a black bow and a white camellia adorned her ponytail – both classic symbols of the Chanel house.

While the brand’s creative director, Virginie Viard, who took over from Karl Lagerfeld after his death in 2019, experimented with hats on the runway, the rest of the collection was business as usual.

Plenty of Chanel signatures were present – including boucle suits, cardigans with statement buttons and quilted bags in all colours of the rainbow.

Layers of statement gold jewellery has long been a hallmark of the label – memorably when Christy Turlington walked the runway for the SS92 couture collection, wearing a black gown and plenty of gold chains, like a more formal version of Hadid’s look.

While plenty of the outfits wouldn’t be out of place on a Nineties Chanel runway, there were also some more modern touches – like a blue cropped puffer jacket with a camellia brooch, elements of denim and a calf-length brown coat with a shearling lining that came with a matching hold-all.

Models walked down a runway made of dark wooden boards, which was said to be inspired by the wooden boardwalk of Deauville, a seaside resort in Normandy.

Deauville was Viard’s key inspiration for the season, and has had a long relationship with the Chanel brand – ever since house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel opened her first fashion boutique there in 1913.

Since then, seaside references inspired by the town have come up time and time again, notably in Karl Lagerfeld’s AW98 collection.

Chanel became a partner of the Deauville American Film Festival in 2019 and the latest Paris Fashion Week collection further highlighted the label’s relationship with film.

The show opened with a short black and white film starring Penelope Cruz and Brad Pitt – they’re seen driving in a car, ordering at a restaurant and walking along the seaside, with a Chanel quilted handbag in full view for most of the clip.

Fashion blogger @stylenotcom noted on Instagram that the short film was inspired by a scene in the 1966 French movie A Man And A Woman (Un Homme Et Une Femme).

Penelope Cruz attends the Chanel Fall/Winter 2024-2025 ready-to-wear collection presented Tuesday, March 5, 2024 in Paris. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Cruz has been a Chanel ambassador since 2018 – memorably wearing a haute couture bridal-style gown from the label to the 2023 Met Gala. She was front row for the Paris Fashion Week show, wearing a shiny black leather-look skirt suit with a pale yellow jumper underneath and a white statement collar.