No one noticed the emojis in Chanel’s new collection

This morning, on the penultimate day of Paris Fashion Week and the AW16 show season, the house of Chanel presented its collection at the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées. This season, there was no elaborate set – no air terminal, no casino, no 265-tonne iceberg – just a salon; this was a return to a traditional mode of fashion presentation. The theme was ‘Front Row Only’ and so guests (all guests) sat, as you can probably deduce, on the front row. In lieu of a more blatant theme, came a more subtle point of reference: emojis.

Emojis, which last year became the fastest growing language in the UK, appeared throughout the collection in the form of victory hand belts, cat face bangles and, most conspicuously in a laminated silk jacket and matching flap bags printed with four leaf clovers, thumbs up signs and more victory hands. Mixed in with the proliferation of pearls and Chanel’s double-C logos, the emojis were hardly noticeable. Blink, and you missed them. 

This isn’t the first time Karl Lagerfeld has shown his love for the computer language – in March 2014, the designer launched the emotiKarl app, which is complete with emojis of his face, his cat Choupette and his hands (clad in fingerless leather gloves, obviously) performing various signals. Last month, Donatella Versace joined the party with her own emoji app complete with hybrids of smileys and the brand’s Medusa head logo.

Stay tuned for Susie Lau’s review of the show