The Boat Race has a new partner. The annual event between Oxford and Cambridge Universities is now associated with Chanel.
A Surprising Alliance
The French fashion house Chanel and The Boat Race announced a new partnership. The annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge universities is to be renamed after a Chanel watch. From next year, the contest will be rebranded ‘The Chanel J12 Boat Race’, taking on the name of a high-end timepiece produced by the privately owned luxury goods company.
This unexpected alliance sent ripples through both the fashion and sporting communities. The Financial Times deemed it significant enough to push other important concerns onto page two.
Tradition Meets Haute Couture
There are many boat races, but there is only one Boat Race. It is one of Britain’s most cherished sporting traditions. An estimated quarter of a million spectators line the river from Putney to Mortlake cheering on the 16 powerfully built oarsmen (and two slightly built coxswains) from the two great universities.
The teams battle it out over 6.8 km of café au lait coloured tidal waters. It has been a part and pillar of British sporting and social life since 1829. That’s not quite as old as the Epsom Derby (1780), but older than Henley Royal Regatta (1839).
Likewise, there is haute couture and there is Chanel, arguably the most famous fashion house in the world. Chanel is renowned for its revolutionary use of jersey fabric, the invention of the “little black dress”, and, of course, the emblematic Chanel No 5.
Echoes of Chanel’s History
Prima facie haute couture and eights racing might seem opposed. But the surprise of the announcement should not obscure the fortuitous and authentic nature of the partnership.
Close students of Chanel’s history will immediately recognise it as an echo of founder Gabrielle Chanel’s fascination with British society. She had a keen eye for adapting elements of British style into her revolutionary designs. The Roaring Twenties in Britain saw the old world of patrician privilege tempered by the awakening of modernity and a growing sense of equality.
During the Twenties, British women achieved rights and freedoms that would have been inconceivable in their mothers’ time. Women achieved equal voting rights and the first women’s Boat Race was held in 1927; the same year that Chanel opened a salon and atelier in Mayfair.
Gabrielle Chanel’s personal relationship with Britain began long before she opened her business. She was an anglophile, in so many ways, not least in the taking of English lovers. Her decade-long affair with “Boy” Capel, a polo player, playboy and shipping heir, not only marked her first sig