“Salam Alaikum Africa!” So sang Obree Daman, flanked by dancers from the École des Sables, at the start of what will surely go down as a milestone Chanel Métiers d’Art show both for the house that presented it and the country that hosted it.
For Chanel to choose to present its first-ever show in Africa—and simultaneously the first show to be presented by any European or US house anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa—was an ambitious move indeed. At a fittings appointment pre-show, backstage in the Senegalese capital’s former Palais de Justice (now home to its art Biennale), Virginie Viard said that the idea first took hold three years ago. Two years of Covid-enforced hiatus followed, before scouting began. “When we first came to this place, Dakar, it was really incredible, and we knew.” she said.
As one of 800 guests you felt the experienced context of this show had been designed as precisely as the collection itself. The first stop post-arrival was on Gorée island, just offshore from the city, a place that was once a hub of the African slave trade under colonial rule and which is now a monument. There was a visit to the studio of sculptor Ousman Sowe, a tour of local artisan markets and an art-filled medina, and a “literary rendezvous” between Marie NDiaye, Charlotte Casiraghi, and Rokhaya Niang (alongside a performance by rapper Nix), plus a stop to see the beautiful furniture design of Ousmane Mbaye. Chanel’s President Bruno Pavlovsky announced a series of upcoming interactions between Chanel’s le19M and Dakar’s IFAN Museum of African Arts that will see exchanges of artisanal expertise between the two. As Pharrel Williams put it before the show: “There’s a serendipity in it being a French maison, and coming back to a place that was once colonized by the French, with a sense of equity… it’s a super-beautiful exercise in humanity.”