“Luckily, they are not based on real life experiences and these things definitely did not happen at this hotel,” teased Lily Allen of her songs, a wink to the opposite being true.
Her intimate performance came at the end of a Chanel dinner in Los Angeles to celebrate the house’s Coco Crush fine jewelry collection.
Allen sang from “West End Girl” while standing by the piano in the living room at Chateau Marmont, the shadowy, sofa-filled space just off the lobby, now transformed into a dining room — and long steeped in Hollywood secrets.
Her album, released in October and her first in seven years, is a confessional dissecting the breakdown of her marriage to actor David Harbour, a betrayal she now hinted took place at the hotel.
“I’ll try not to laugh, but it’s going to be hard,” she said before “Pussy Palace,” grinning at the absurdity of the moment as she giggled through its cheeky lyrics. “You guys might have to help me.”
Moments earlier, Tessa Thompson had introduced Allen, warming up the room.
“Everyone wants to meet you,” she smiled, pointing to actor Connor Storrie, who was seated just opposite her. “This is your chance,” she told the crowd.
Storrie, one half of television’s most buzzed-about duo alongside costar Hudson Williams on “Heated Rivalry,” has been riding a wave of overnight fame. The room lit up at the mention.
Glasses clinked and conversations resumed over martinis and wine, following a cocktail hour in the penthouse upstairs. Dinner had already been served: Caesar salad, rib eye, and branzino. Berries and cream came next, accompanied by silver trays of chocolates.
The VIPs wore Coco Crush, Chanel’s bestselling fine jewelry line, which debuted in 2015. Now entering its second decade, it’s defined by delicately curving edges that echo the house’s signature quilting and has recently added some new, supple designs.
“I think about what person I want to be today,” said Becky Armstrong, a Chanel ambassador, of putting on jewelry. “Today is an edgy, effortless kind of look,” she added, wearing the line’s ribbon-like white gold and diamond choker with jeans and a blazer.
Gracie Abrams, the face of its new campaign, traced her earliest connection to the house not to jewelry, but to fragrance.
“My grandmother had Chanel No. 5,” she said. “I remember being very curious about this magical bottle on her bathroom sink.”
That early fascination eventually grew into something deeper: “As soon as you enter the world as a conscious person, you learn about Chanel and the legacy of the house.”
Her most cherished pieces are the ones she never removes. “These rings, I don’t take off,” she said of three gold bands — Coco Crush, naturally. “They feel like second skin.”
Sarah Pidgeon, too, referenced Chanel No. 5 as her first link to the brand.
“My mom wore the perfume,” said Pidgeon, also a Chanel ambassador. “I remember seeing it on her vanity growing up and stealing a few spritzes as a six-year-old.”
Stepping into the role of Carolyn Bessette for Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story,” out next month, only sharpened Pidgeon’s appreciation for fashion’s quieter power.
“Her clothing was very simple,” she said of Bessette. “That’s why she’s such a style icon. Everyone has a great pair of jeans or a white T-shirt. It was about tailoring, about things fitting perfectly.”
Wearing the same designers and pieces as Bessette — though not her actual garments — helped unlock the character in unexpected ways.
“Your body changes when you put on a jacket or a pair of jeans,” Pidgeon continued. “Understanding how things might have fit on her, and how it made my body feel, became such a big part of the character development.”
Thompson was also one to bring up Chanel No. 5 unprompted — and, fittingly, a crush.
“My earliest memory of Chanel is probably a tweed jacket of my grandmother’s,” she said, before laughing as she recalled buying her first bottle of No. 5 in junior high. At 14, working at Hot Dog on a Stick in a mall, she stopped at a beauty counter before meeting someone she liked.
“I would leave work smelling like lemons and oil, and I was going to hang out with someone I had a crush on and didn’t have time to go home and shower,” she said. “So I went into the bathroom, freshened up. I got paid that day — it was a Friday — and I was going to buy myself a bottle of perfume and put something on before I went to meet this crush…I didn’t even really know. It just seemed chic.”
It was an unintentional Coco Crush moment.
“Oh my god,” she said, laughing as the connection dawned on her. “I hadn’t even thought about that. It’s true.”
Thompson is heading into awards season with a Golden Globe nomination, Best Actress in a Drama for her film “Hedda.”
“There are a couple of looks that are ready and done and set and really exciting, and they are very different girls and very different feelings,” she said of her fashion options for Sunday. “These moments are so special and the culmination of such an incredible amount of work, and I think I just want to really feel celebratory. And ‘Hedda,’ it was a really big swing, and she’s a woman who’s really daring and audacious, and so I think just a little bit of the spirit of her, too, onto the red carpet. I’ll be thinking of her.”
As guests lingered after the performance, Thompson planned to stay. She was heading upstairs, where a small group of friends would gather for the premiere of her new Netflix series, the thriller “His & Hers.”
“In my room at midnight.”
