Gabrielle Chanel reopened her couture house in 1954, at the age of 71, with a show on 5 February that was warmly received by the American press. Two years later, according to the house's own chronology, she introduced the trimmed tweed suit that became its signature: a collarless jacket edged in braid, worn with a matching skirt.
The suit drew on ideas Chanel had pursued since the 1910s, when she sold jersey skirt-and-jacket suits and practical sportswear that freed women from corseted silhouettes. It stood in direct contrast to the structured, padded tailoring then dominant in Paris.
Vogue photographed Marie-Hélène Arnaud in a Chanel suit in September 1958, and the style became a uniform for fashionable women through the 1960s. When Karl Lagerfeld took over in 1983 he kept tweed, braid, gold accents and chains as house signatures, and the suit has been reworked in every collection since.