Little did Chanel’s Virginie Viard know that she would make longtime collaborator Michel Gaubert’s dreams come true when she chose the northern English city of Manchester as the location for yesterday’s Metiers d’Art collection. (Every year Chanel picks a new destination as the theme and inspiration for a collection that showcases the creativity of its artisanal maisons.) “I’d never been to Manchester before this project,” Gaubert, the house’s music supervisor, said via Zoom on a recent evening, dialing in from his Manchester hotel room. “But I’ve been listening to music from Manchester since the ’80s. And I was always fascinated by what England looked like beyond London.”
Of course, it’s not so much the sights as the sonic associations that really inspired him—enough that Gaubert, who also handles the music for the likes of Dior and Sacai, hasn’t only done the Metiers d’Art show’s soundtrack, an aural love letter to the city and beyond: He has also compiled a vinyl double album specially pressed (no downloading here, pop kids—unless you want to get the tracks Gaubert has selected, which are listed here after our chat) to commemorate the most French of houses arriving in the most English of cities. The eight tracks, some of which also featured in the show, chronicle the city’s musical output over the last 40 years, from Joy Division to the Fall to New Order to newer talents like Afrodeutsche.
The album is housed in a sleeve designed by Peter Saville with Paul Hetherington. Saville designed iconic cover art for the bands signed to Manchester record label Factory, the home of New Order, among other legendary acts. (Factory, incidentally, was owned by the late iconoclastic local TV news anchor Tony Wilson: Think Anderson Cooper spending his non-CNN working hours running Sub Pop, Nirvana’s record label, and you’ve got the idea.) That sleeve was a thrill for Gaubert too: “It is beautiful—I could never have dreamed of this happening,” he says. During our conversation, Gaubert chatted about his and Viard’s love of British music, the one song he wished he could have included on the album, and why the music-free environment of stores in his native France back in the day has a lot to answer for.
Vogue: When you first heard that Virginie was doing her next Chanel Metiers d’Arts show in Manchester, what did you think?
Michel Gaubert: Something that Virginie and I share is this love of England. We’re not British, and I don’t think either of us will ever live in England. But there’s this fascination with England being…I wouldn’t say cooler than France. Maybe it’s a bit more, I hate this word, edgy. It’s a bit more piquant than France, more daring, maybe. The British punk movement was the most radical movement I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean, they were all, Okay, let’s just do this, let’s just make music. Then there was also the fashion of that moment…. I mean, there are a lot of things in England she and I find very intriguing. Virginie has that, definitely. And for Chanel, she works with a lot of British fabrics, like the tweeds and the cashmeres. And then I guess Coco Chanel had a few English lovers here and there too. [Laughs.]