Cindy Sherman Raided The Chanel Archives For Her New London Solo Show

While, on the one-hand, fashion has become pretty good at espousing an earnest commitment to diversity – to broadening its understanding of what meaningful representation looks like, whether in terms of age, race, size or otherwise – the parameters of that diversity remain as hysterically narrow as they ever have been.

That’s what struck Cindy Sherman as she was leafing through a promotional magazine for an upscale jewellers in East Hampton, the tony Long Island town where the legendary conceptual artist maintains a summer home. Flicking through the pages, she found herself mesmerised by a shoot featuring a renowned former swimsuit model in her early 70s: “Around my age, but she’d clearly been digitally altered to look younger, and was just dripping with jewels,” she shares with British Vogue. “Every photo was ostentatiously maximised for showing off wealth, and trying to convey youth and sexiness. It seemed more phoney and hilariously pretentious than your usual Hamptons magazine.”

And thus, the seed for Fabric Matrons, the new body of work she’s unveiling this week at Hauser & Wirth’s London outpost on Savile Row, was sown. For the artist’s first major show in the city since her 2019 retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, Sherman presents a series of portraits of characters that ape the campy ostentation and almost comical opulence of her source material – albeit with a keen self-awareness, a wry criticality and a blunt humour.

The resulting characters are imbued with such seemingly dense, interior psychologies that you’d think them to be the product of extensive scripting; or at least that they’d long been gestating in the artist’s mind. It turns out their origin stories are rather more happenstance. “I never actually have any preconceived notions of what the characters’ state of minds are, or make up any background stories for them,” Sherman explains. “Their development usually comes from taking a lot of shots while trying on various wigs, adjusting the make-up, camera angles… there’s a lot of trial and error.”

Sherman sought to build these characters using self-sourced rolls of chintzy fabrics and mounds of gaudy costume jewellery. To begin with, her trials kept landing closer to error, but that all changed thanks to Chanel, with the fashion house offering the artist access to its archive of fabrics. At first, Sherman received smaller swatches of exquisite textural tweeds that she twisted and draped into brooch-pinned headwraps and peasant bonnets. It was “the limitations of those initial samples of the fabric that really directed what was possible”, she explains.

As the series developed, Chanel Patrimoine – the house’s archive and heritage department – not only gave Sherman access to its repository of materials, delivering longer and longer yards of precious gold and leather-darted bouclés; but also license to do as she pleased with them, slashing holes in the priceless cloth to create raw-hemmed armholes; or draping and pinning tweeds into figure-warping gowns and undulating backdrops. “The fabrics became essential components of the backgrounds and costumes, and thus the development of the characters,” she says.

Of course, fashion – and perhaps more so style – is a red thread running through Sherman’s practice all the way back to the early ’70s, her images unpicking the role of clothing, jewellery and make-up in the construction, presentation and valorisation of feminine identities. Her relationship to fashion has always been coloured with socio-critical nous, “challenging the stereotypes embedded in society”, says Yana Peel, president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel, while “championing the multiplicity of a woman in her fullest form”.

This is not the first time that Sherman has collaborated with the house. The relationship dates back to her Ominous Landscapes (2010-12) series, in which Sherman’s spectral figures sported archival garments against barren, craggy vistas. “Learning about some of the history of the brand, like how Coco Chanel made fashion for the modern woman, freeing up one’s hands by inventing the shoulder bag, adding pockets to a dress, or a secret part of a purse for one’s love letters,” she recalls, “it made it more relevant to me.”

Sherman’s choice to forgo working with fully-fashioned garments to focus instead on the house’s fabrics only adds to the uncanniness of the images. With their abundance of raw edges, crumpled backdrops, and a clear sense of the garments having been hastily draped and pinned in place, it’s impossible to ignore the images’ highly produced nature – or rather, attention is actively called to it. There’s a clear, concerted conflict between an image’s intended effect, the instruments involved in its construction, and a concealed reality – not to mention a reflection on the reasons for the concealment in the first place.

It’s a logic that also steers Sherman’s approach to the use of make-up throughout the series: certain characters appear with uncannily smooth, trowelled-on faces; others with barefaced wrinkled countenances. “It was with this in mind, and also the idea of retouching without actual retouching, that I was also using skin-like gloves for several of the characters,” she explains, in what feels like a canny nod to the much-cited beauty fan factoid that the hands typically reflect age more than the face.

Sherman shrewdly distils the awkwardness and complexity that colours conversations around women and ageing that are embedded in both fashion and culture at large. There’s a clear, unresolved tension between the supposed embrace and veneration of the ageing woman’s body and the ubiquitous impulse to airbrush its reality. Beyond acting as a commentator, though, there’s a powerful personal charge to the pictures. While Sherman has long cast herself as the primary actor in the scenes she creates, she has maintained that the resulting images are never of “her” as she exists outside of the frame. Still, she concedes that certain tactics involved in the making of Fabric Matrons are the result of considerations anchored in personal vulnerability. She describes her use of flesh-coloured gloves, for one, as an acknowledgement of “my self-consciousness in exposing too much skin”.

“I think at this point, with each subsequent body of work I do, I will continue to be forced to reckon with the ageing of my body,” she continues, “as technology gets better and better, higher resolution shows more imperfections. One can watch oneself age while in the camera’s eye.” That’s a lot for anyone to grapple with, especially when working alongside one of the most totemic names in an industry that isn’t exactly famous for its come-as-you-are embrace. Working on this series, Sherman notes how “the legacy of Chanel felt more intimidating this time, even merely working with bits of fabric. I felt more pressure, perhaps from being older, and I had to acknowledge my own insecurities until I was free to experiment with the old biddies living inside of me. Fashion and wrinkles don’t easily mix.”

With Fabric Matrons, Sherman makes a compelling case for how well they can, though. That’s clear not just from the pictures, but from their appearance on the pages of a magazine. In a full-circle turn from its genesis point, images from the series appear in the sophomore volume of Chanel’s annual Arts & Culture magazine – including on the cover. “There could be no one better to grace the cover of Vol.2 than Cindy Sherman, who for five decades has examined the construction of identity and the power over personae that women hold,” says Peel, ahead of the issue’s formal launch in London during Frieze week. “Her new portraits are fearless in their honesty – some blunt, some beautiful, all alluring. The portfolio reveals an exceptional emotional range, connecting women by illuminating both their individuality and the universality of our experience – and the inclusion of Chanel fabrics and costume jewellery from the House archive as a catalyst for creation sparks a tête-à-tête with Gabrielle Chanel, whose own life and work championed women’s freedom to inhabit many identities.”

Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Worth London until 23 December 2026.