L’Iris de Chanel exhibition opens in Villa Windsor

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
May 29, 2024

It felt like a day of Scottish showers on Wednesday when it rained continuously upon the L’Iris de Chanel display at Villa Windsor in Paris.

Villa Windsor is the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the location of Jardins Jardins, an elegant horticultural salon of tony suppliers.
 
Ironically, Chanel actually housed all the hundreds of Irises used in its garden show inside refrigerators in Paris for several weeks, in order for them to bloom in time for this week. The rain didn't manage to block the famed scent.

Chanel’s display was the most elegant corner of the salon, a sweet-smelling demonstration, the better to admire this rare flower. A decade ago, Chanel allied with the Mul family to create an iris farm of some 15 hectares in Provence. The Muls are noted farm operators for five generations, famed for growing and processing raw materials – like roses, jasmine and tuberose.
 
First cultivated historically in Tuscany, the distilled extraction of iris pallida, or pale iris, farmed in Provence today is used in four Chanel scents: No. 19, named after Coco’s birthday; La Pausa for her Mediterranean villa; the famed No. 5’s purest extract; and Comète, launched this spring.
 
The actual scent comes from the iris rhizome, tuber like growths beneath the soil. Each plant needs three years to grow, while the cultivated rhizome needs a further three years to mature, as shown in this careful educational display.
 
Seen by crowds milling around under umbrellas at the villa, whose Franco-Britannic legacy is underlined by its other tenants. General Charles de Gaulle and family lived here for two years after the liberation of Paris in 1944. While the Windsors made the classical villa their home until the duchess's death in 1986, followed by Mohammed Al Fayed.
 
Maybe that’s why it rained so much on Wednesday.