Fashion's Nature Spectacles: Chanel's Grand Palais Beach and Dior's Replanted Trees

Chanel staged a Spring-Summer 2019 fashion show featuring a beach scene under the glass dome of Paris's Grand Palais, complete with a thatched hut, pier, and waves. This follows other elaborate nature-themed sets by the fashion house, including snowy villages, ocean liners, and a replica Eiffel Tower. Dior's Spring/Summer 2020 show, produced by Bureau Betak, involved over 160 trees that were QR-coded for traceability and replanting. Alexandre de Betak of Bureau Betak notes fashion's rapid response to environmental trends. Belgian designer Raf Simons, during his tenure at Dior, created mixed environments like a 2015 flower mountain in the Louvre's Cour Carrée that transformed into a high-tech space. These installations recall artistic precedents like Pierre Huyghe's biotopes and Haus-Rucker-Co's 1970s projects such as Stück Natur and Oase no 7. The sealed ecosystem experiment Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona, which failed in 1993 due to carbon dioxide issues, parallels these enclosed fashion landscapes. Writer Clara Young, based in Paris, explores these themes in the January & February 2020 issue of ArtReview.