Chanel Connects: Paris brand launches new podcast series

How did Tilda Swinton sustain her love for film and the cinema when theatres first closed their doors last spring and movie sets halted production?

The actress picked up A Life in Movies, the 1986 published memoirs of Oscar-nominated filmmaker Michael Powell, a peer of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.

“[It’s] almost a biography of cinema itself because he started making films in the very, very beginning,” Swinton explains.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It was Powell’s retelling of cinema history that buoyed Swinton’s belief in the art forms’ return, post lockdowns. “Everybody’s said that apart from live music, what we really want to do is go to the pictures.”

Speaking from her home in northern Scotland, Swinton joined Condé Nast’s European editorial director Edward Enniful and Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, for Chanel Connects.

In seven episodes, the Parisian brand’s new podcast series groups genre-defining names influential in fields such as dance, contemporary art and architecture to self-record their conversations, which reflect on the past few months’ effect on culture and future efforts.

As Pharrell Williams joins London-based artist Es Devlin, painter Jennifer Packer connects with 2019 Venice Biennale winner Arthur Jafa, and Amanda Harlech calls Andrew Bolton (head curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume institute), topics including the influence of technology on creativity, fashion history, and how to express political narratives creatively are mulled over.

Chanel Connects is available from today on Spotify, Apple and Chanel.com