Launching today, CHANEL Haute Couture is Sofia Coppola’s love letter to a House she first encountered as a teenage intern at 31 rue Cambon. The 450-page volume traces the history of CHANEL from Gabrielle Chanel through Karl Lagerfeld to Virginie Viard, told through Coppola’s signature collage-like storytelling.
The director and CHANEL ambassador reflected on that relationship in a podcast series released by the House for the Fall-Winter 2025/26 Haute Couture show, which marked 110 years of CHANEL Haute Couture. In conversation with Géraldine Sarratia, Coppola recalled her very first internship in the creation studio and how it shaped her eye for fashion and aesthetic detail.
As she explained in the podcast, her book was never meant to be “academic,” with couture on mannequins as you would see in a museum. Instead, she gathered hundreds of society portraits, event photographs, illustrations, and editorial images — from Elle Fanning by Zoë Ghertner to Margaret Qualley and Edie Campbell by Inez & Vinoodh for W. “I thought, oh, I’d love to put together images of how they’re worn in life and who are the women that wear them… I also wanted to look at the codes of Chanel, which I love, throughout the years that you can identify with: a bow or a camelia or certain colors and the tweed.”
Designed by Anamaria Morris for Joseph Logan Design and co-published by Éditions 7L and Coppola’s imprint Important Flowers at MACK, the book is both archive and reverie. Out worldwide today, it’s one to mark for anyone fascinated by fashion’s enduring mythology.
