Amid the £100,000 outfits at Chanel, this affordable luxury stood out

With all the hand-sewn beading and delicate-as-eyelashes tulle involved in their making, some of these Chanel evening dresses won’t leave much change from £200,000. Even those tasteful little satin co-respondent wedge shoes will probably top out at around £1,200. This is couture week and its purpose is categorically not to be relatable.

And yet… In a tough economic market – when even the super-rich have proved resistant to some of the more audacious price rises that the luxury brands say they have been forced to implement by the increased costs of raw materials – relatability, or a modicum of it, was exactly what Chanel served up in Paris on Monday.

Lisa Armstrong

All but five of its 55 looks featured models in a shade of Chanel matte-red lipstick, each customised to suit the models’ individual skin tones. Chanel produces many reds – yours for around £32 and for many, an affordable luxury they’re happy to fork out for. For the show, as many as three shades were blended together. While the black models wore paler colours, this was a demonstration of the universality of red: from blondes and redheads to brunettes, Indian and East Asian skins, there was a red to suit.

But this seemed more than a lesson in make-up application. It’s also a demonstration of the mighty economic firepower of beauty products. There’s barely a high-luxury fashion label in Europe and the US that hasn’t seen a torpid performance in sales of its clothes in the past 18 months. Even bags are proving a harder sell.

To that point, there were no bags in this show – and that in itself is noteworthy. This is a house with a seemingly endless pipeline of infinite variations on its beloved quilted 2.55 gold chained bag (which was first launched in 1955) which it loves to send down the catwalk. Those natty tweed suits are normally accompanied by multiple jaunty bags, often several on one outfit. The Chanel bag’s fertility rate is vigorous.

But nor were there necklaces, earrings, hair accessories or any other iterations of Chanel’s other signature – pearl jewellery.

Not that the clothes didn’t speak for themselves. Chanel’s long-awaited new designer, Matthieu Blazy, will show his first collection in September. Until then, the anonymous Chanel team continues, most impressively, to hold the fort. This was a skillful, light-handed (if necessarily labour-intensive) display of all Chanel’s strengths: bantam-weight tweeds, whispery fine chiffons and silks, sometimes bonded together in a single dress or jumpsuit. Hemlines were mainly above the knee. Shorts abounded – which will do nothing to move the dial. You either love shorts and already wear them in summer, or you don’t.

The suits with bright silk linings and collars looked fresh, and the evening dresses were ethereal without looking tweedy. Delightful for the 0.001 percent. By the way, if you’re thinking Chanel missed a trick in not somehow acknowledging its most commercial product of all, Chanel No. 5, on the catwalk – a bottle was in each of the audience’s goody bag.