Tyla, the South-African pop star who made waves with her hit song “Water” and a run of fabulous, viral looks that included a dress made of sand by Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing at the 2024 Met Gala, and a tiny Chanel corset she wore as a dress at the VMAs in September, has just released a new single titled, plainly, “Chanel.”
The premise of the song is simple: “How you say you love me, if you ain’t put me in Chanel?” Tyla sings with her signature, sumptuous R&B-esque vocals. Forget the ring. Get me a little tweed set and a 2.55 bag—now that is true love.
“The song ‘Chanel’ is not only about spoiling me, it’s about being treated like luxury. Being the gift!” says Tyla via text. “I was in head to toe vintage Chanel for the music video. It was fun playing with the pieces and making them my own… Say you love me? PUT ME IN CHANELLLLL!”
Tyla may be waiting for her Chanel-clad prince, but her stylist, Ron Hartleben, whose expertise is in ’90s fashion, made her wish come true and put her in Chanel—lots of it, and of the most iconic kind in the video for the new song. The majority of what Hartleben sourced comes from Karl Lagerfeld’s most legendary collections and was gathered from vintage dealers across the globe: There’s the little golden revolver (plus holster) from fall 1993; a host of classic jeweled belts from his noughties shows; and, of course, the hula hoop bag from spring 2013. The brand was not involved in the making of this video, but Tyla has attended a Chanel show in the past—could this song put the star in Matthieu Blazy’s planetarium? Here, Hartleben talks about the new video and how he secured the pieces.
What was the brief for you here, and how did you approach it once you heard the song and knew there’d be a video?
Tyla is always very open to hearing from her team; she wants to absorb everyone’s ideas and then find the path that happens organically and makes the most sense. Having myself worked for Carine [Roitfeld] for so long and having had the opportunity to work with Karl [Lagerfeld] through her for a bunch of different campaigns, Chanel as a brand is super important to me as a fashion nerd, and as somebody who cares about the legacy of clothes and the things that happened in the ’90s and shaped everything that people love today. That’s my favorite time period in fashion. Immediately I was just like, we have to go full-on vintage ’90s. I was also attracted to the idea of putting this non-white woman in these extremely proper clothes but in her own way, to fuck them up a bit. I wanted to find the craziest things for her to wear, and pay homage to those key moments: Karl’s hip-hop collection, those Peter Lindbergh photos with Linda [Evangelista], and amalgamate them into one modern thing that made sense for Tyla. I think she’s one of the only people who could really carry these things today, because what made those clothes special was the person wearing them. It was the beauty of the muse that made them important: Claudia Schiffer, Naomi [Campbell]. Those people made those clothes more than just clothes. Their energy made them next level, and Tyla was able to carry them.
Did she know you’d be going as hard as you did with the vintage hunting?
When we had the fitting she was totally surprised. I don’t think that she expected me to go as hard as I did!
How did you work with the director, Aerin Moreno, to pull the vision together?
She is incredible, she’s done Tate McRae’s “Revolving Door” and works with Madison Beer. She just has a really great eye and she has this really strong feminine approach. She’s kind of like the Sofia Coppola of music videos [laughs], and she’s obsessed with the same things that I am. She got it immediately, that this is a ’90s supermodel fashion editorial.
The most important question: Is everything in the video Chanel?
Every single piece of clothing in that video, besides the Hanes tank in the black void scene where she has the blonde bob, is Chanel. Even her undergarments, even her shoes and her shorts. The Hanes tank was a very intentional piece because that’s Tyla. It’s the connecting element that made everything make sense.
I kept telling Tyla about the pieces she’d wear, how iconic they were or how crazy everyone has been going over them since forever, these things people went crazy for on Tumblr when we were growing up. I was like, for you to hold this bag is going to be a huge deal for people who are going to be, like, how the fuck did she get that? It got her excited and kind of made her into a little bit of a fashion nerd. The really exciting thing is it’s going to be a whole new generation who gets to experience these pieces and these collections because of her, because they’re young; her fans are Gen Z, they’re kids!
Did you go into this with a wishlist of pieces, or was it more about what you could find?
For most videos I get very short notice to just make a look happen. It was a happy accident that the original shoot got postponed and I had an extra week to get things, and Ashley [Sandoval, Hartleben’s “right left hand”] and I were going crazy reaching out to vintage collectors who are not as well known outside of these Chanel vintage collecting circles. We were DMing people, emailing random emails, talking to people in Bumfuck Nowhere who just happened to have a warehouse full of Chanel. And there were some really incredible people we met along the way, including Anthology of Style and Vintage Heritage.
The rental costs for these things are astronomical, and I explained I had a fraction of that and they really believed in it and let me get away with murder. It was so emotional for me, to be honest, to see some of these pieces I had been obsessed with since I was little. These era-defining moments like the hula hoop bag, all of these museum-quality pieces they trusted me with. She’s wearing these belts that are each like $20,000 at full retail, these classic Karl leather pieces, it was so cool to put them together. I did have to sign my life away in case things broke. But nothing broke!
I really appreciate that you didn’t replicate runway looks—there are no recreations. I’m assuming this was also very intentional?
Yeah, absolutely. because we did have full looks from the ’90s. We had the full Linda [Evangelista] pink gown. We could have done that. And we have iterations of it that we tried, but it just didn’t feel like Tyla. That’s also something that would be great for an editorial, it would make a great photo, but for her to be the character that is Tyla in the music videos, it didn’t make sense to be so referential in that way. We had to fuck it up a little bit, just a little nastier.
Manifesting that for you. You guys teased the Chanel moment at the VMAs, right?
Yes. We shot the video in the middle of the summer and we thought it was coming out a lot sooner. When she decided to go to the VMAs, we thought of doing something Chanel as the lead up, because she had started dropping hints about it. We did the corset top, which is meant to be worn with pants, as a dress. The pink version is in the video. It was a huge uproar and a whole other conversation online [laughs], but you zoom out, you see how it all connects. I was happy that the VMAs look was so widely well-received and so widely criticized, because it was the perfect lead-up to the song coming out.
.jpg)