Tilda Swinton, Xin Zhilei and Leah Dou star in a special film ahead of Chanel’s Métiers d’art 2025 show in Hangzhou

We’re a day away from Chanel’s 2025 Métiers d’art show—with the location set in the famed West Lake in Hangzhou, China. The perfect setting to celebrate the artisanal craft of the Métiers d’art—given the city’s exceptional heritage of silk manufacturing and trade. Now, the beautiful premise also sets the scene for the house’s new film by Wim Wenders, featuring actresses Xin Zhilei, Tilda Swinton and Leah Dou.

After all, it is where the poignant link between the West Lake and Gabrielle Chanel is uncovered. It was from her Paris home, that the esteemed founder regarded visions of the lake daily, rendered on a Chinese Lacquer screen and also a focal artwork that was displayed in her private office. This continued to inspire Mademoiselle Chanel’s creative vision and aspirations, as her imagination came to play given that she never actually visited China herself.

In honour of that, the very same lake is featured in the new film to mark the maison’s collection in Hangzhou—one that stars actresses Tilda Swinton, Xin Zhilei and newly-minted ambassador Leah Dou. Under Wenders’ direction, Mademoiselle Chanel’s aforementioned screen is reimagined as a new window to the world and with the aid of technology, dreams of the past interplay with modern life. Of past and present and of tradition and newness.

A longtime collaborator of the house, Swinton shared: “It has been my sincere privilege to have been close to the House of Chanel for more than a dozen years, now, and my enthusiasm for the work we are able to do together only grows with every year. Chanel takes very seriously its role as cultural patron and source of support and encouragement to artists and arts institutions around the planet, and never has this work been more important, in my view.”