Chanel (Q1730)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
French fashion house
- Chanel SA
- Chanel S.A.
- House of Chanel
- Chanel (firma)
- Modehuis Chanel
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Chanel |
French fashion house |
|
Statements
8,630,000,000
2016
9,623,000,000
2017
11,119,000,000
2018
12,273,000,000
2019
10,108,000,000
2020
15,639,000,000
2021
17,224,000,000
2022
2025
creative director
1 reference
1989
public relations
freelance designer
client
accessories designer
1996
knitwear designer
2004
jewelry designer
founder
There is a Coromandel screen at Apartment Rue Cambon that once graced the 31 Rue Cambon apartment of Gabrielle Chanel. Black lacquer inlaid with mother of pearl, the screen, one of 32 believed to be in the designer’s private collection, depicted the rolling hills and sculptural pines, the pagodas and pleasure boats of the scenic West Lake in Hangzhou, a city Chanel would never visit in her lifetime. This Coromandel screen was the starting point of the latest Metiers d’Art collection, which waxed on the idea of a journey to Hangzhou like one Chanel might have taken in her dreams, perhaps gazing at the artful lacquer and imagining herself there.In the absence of an artistic director, the studio team took up the task of executing this season’s celebration of house savoir-faire, for which Chanel flew more than four hundred guests to Hangzhou. At the entrance, waiters with glass pots of tea and flutes of sparkling wine stood before a small fleet of wooden boats with glass windows, some with ornate gold lotus ornaments on the sides, that ferried guests like actress Lupita Nyong'o and director Wim Wenders over the water. Upon reaching the distant shore, past an expanse of trees, a pianist sat on a circular platform, lit by a single spotlight, playing songs like a Shostakovich waltz as guests crossed the wooden walkway leading out to a sleek black half-shell, where six rows of seats spread out in a semicircle. Fog on the lake set the mood, sending showgoers into the dreamscape.At nightfall, to the beat of traditional drums, the first models emerged in head to toe black, dripping, as though they were creatures emerging from the lake, as in dreams. The long shouldered coats, beautifully cut in tweed and satin and velvet, were the first in the collection’s key proposition: layering (and lots of it), for the soigné packrat who simply must prepare for every dressing occasion. There were bags on bags on bags, carried together—mini flap bags attached to quilted totes and duffel bags, crystal clutches sparkling with dream-like stars. A series of satin-silk “pillow” bags in shades like pale pistachio and canary yellow spoke to both the travel and dream themes, alongside a certain ease of silhouette in flared pants and slip dresses, knit skirts and sweaters, elongated by incredible over-the-knee wedge boots.Much like the collection as a whole, the references to China were elegant and restrained, letting the Chanel artisans’ craft shine through.
Sleek black patent leather referred to the sheen of lacquer, while pleating by Lognon, the resident pleaters at Le19M, on all manner of skirts and dresses resembled the creases of a fan, as did a palm-sized clutch shaped like a clamshell. A Lesage tweed four pocket jacket featured velvet braided pankou knots or frog closures, as one might see on a cheongsam; other classic tweed skirt suits were worn over knit bodysuits, woven with scenes from Chanel’s Coromandel screen, for a modern twist. A tiny saddle-shaped clutch was loosely inspired by the curve of a fortune cookie. An exquisite pair of black boots depicted clouds, as one might see on a traditional Chinese painting, intricately beaded and embroidered by Lesage.Once the show finished, the audience rose, murmuring soft sounds of satisfaction. Chic and expensive, cohesive and impeccably crafted. It was a wonderful dream, even without a clear dreamer. Suffice to say the excitement was raised for whoever comes next to guide this team, spinning the next chapter of Chanel’s beautiful fantasy.
3 December 2024
Chanel was back at the Grand Palais for the first time in four years. The sun poured in through its freshly renovated glass roof and gave the embroidered tweeds of the many clients in attendance added sparkle. They were in their happy place, taking selfies and complimenting one another’s looks, apparently unbothered by the empty creative director’s seat that has been the subject of so much speculation among industry insiders since the shows began a month ago in New York.Front row discussions have focused on not just who should get the job, but what kind of talent they should be: A marketing genius? A creative guru? And wouldn’t it feel right and true if it were a woman? Everyone has an opinion, including Hedi Slimane, who dropped a surprise Celine collection online over the weekend with distinctive Coco leanings.For spring, Chanel’s creative studio took the Grand Palais itself as a starting point. The show’s most remarkable pieces were hand-knit in the pattern of its soaring Art Deco iron and steel work. Lightness, airiness, and a whisper of ephemerality were the directives for the collection, which the studio team achieved in various ways: skirts with front slits that proffered glimpses of leg, collars made from layers of downy feathers, trailing chiffon capes, and platform shoes that added a feeling of youthfulness to the proceedings.An enormous birdcage stood at the center of the Palais, a callback to a Jean-Paul Goude–directed, Vanessa Paradis–starring Chanel commercial circa 1991. The models crisscrossed the cage as they made their way back and forth around the nave, and the vast distances they walked were a visual reminder of the house’s long history. The creative team had ideas about how to keep its proprietary tweeds looking fresh: by using candy pastels or swapping the famous skirt suit for a shorts suit. There were surprises, too, like a black denim jacket and jeans, both embellished with shiny black sequins, which caught the casual way that the young women working at the “accessorization” in the atelier a couple of days before the show make Chanel every day and their own.The evening looks were created in a similarly playful spirit, mixing embellished denim and a feather-dusted baby blue cape, and adding a chiffon train to a sparkly tweed jumpsuit. Riley Keough wore something along those lines when she sang Prince’s “When Doves Cry” perched from a swing inside the birdcage at the finale.
The dove is paused mid-flight, and the whole industry is watching to see which way it takes off again.
1 October 2024
A change of scenery at Chanel. Today’s haute couture show was staged at the Palais Garnier. Though the Grand Palais—home of Chanel shows since the Karl Lagerfeld era—was recently refurbished, it’s now being prepped for the Olympics fencing competition, so a new venue was needed. The French director, Christophe Honoré, was hired to reimagine the opera house for the occasion, and his idea was to transport the red velvet boxes of the gilded theater to its hallways. Guests were encouraged to arrive early to walk the corridors the way operagoers have for the 150 years since its opening.It’s been less than three weeks since news broke that Viriginie Viard, who inherited the artistic director position after Lagerfeld’s passing in 2019, was exiting the house. But today’s collection, according to notes provided by the house, was the work of the Fashion Creation Studio.The team took the show’s setting as a design cue. Vittoria Ceretti’s opening look was a sweeping opera cape in black taffeta, its ruff neckline framing her face and her hair pulled back by a grosgrain bow. At the end, Angelina Kendall played the bride in white taffeta cut along the voluminous lines of Princess Diana’s wedding dress. These pieces had whimsy and drama in equal measure. There was also a mint green taffeta trapeze dress suspended from black bows at the shoulders and worn over a little black knit romper.In between, runway operatics were downplayed in favor of an embrace of house standards. The classic Chanel skirt suit was renewed in salt and pepper tweeds with tassel embroideries or fringing at the cuffs and hems, or else it was cut in vibrant jewel tones and embellished with colorful cabochon stones. A double-breasted duster coat was a fine canvas for showcasing a variegated tufted tweed with a touchable texture. Bows were a recurring motif, turning up on a bronze lace skirt and a black coatdress. To a lesser extent, feathers were also a recurring motif, embellishing an evening cape that comes down to the knee above a long pink lamé shirtdress.Evening was more out of the box, with its emphasis on lacquered jersey used for the skirt of a long slip dress and the ruffled bodice of another number. In black on a button-front coat, it gleamed in the theater lights.We are entr’acte at Chanel, with a new artistic director not yet named and no timeline given. Outside the Palais Garnier, it’s safe to say that every couture show this week is an audition for the coveted position.
Inside the house, there were pretty pieces that will connect with clients. As the crowd emptied out into the street, editors priced out of the haute couture were whispering about the playful hair bows and crystal heel sandals.
25 June 2024
The Olympic flame arrives in Marseille by boat from Greece next week. It’s on its way to the biggest French Mediterranean port, to be passed hand-by-hand in relay up the country, ready to ignite the opening of the 2024 Paris summer games. Team Chanel got to Marseille first, though, putting on a fashion-art mini festival around its cruise 2025 show. Virginie Viard’s hooded white scuba suit, Chanel-ed up with a black bow, flew the flag for the fact that the city (the country’s second most populous after Paris) is a natural arena for water sports. The Chanel suit had acquired an athletic attitude too—a gray sweatshirt poking out of a bright green tweed jacket at the opening, while on the feet, amongst the ballet shoes, were slick black slippers that Viard laughingly described as “scuba tuxedo” shoes.Marseille will host the Olympic sailing contests as well as the soccer tournament—and so, come July, the world will become aware that France isn’t only about Paris, for a change. Just as Chanel’s Manchester show put the focus on the uniquely hip music and industrial history of Britain’s “second” city, so it did this time for the very specific culture of Marseille.“A lot of things are happening here. There’s a good vibe, a good energy. Because it’s a port it’s a crossroads of many different cultures living here together,” said Chanel’s President of Fashion Bruno Pavlovsky before the show. “Something’s happening that’s very strong—music, dance, art. Chanel’s coming here, he said, “is a way to discover or rediscover the creative energy that’s everywhere.”To Viard, Marseille is a more excitingly real city than the obvious Cote d’Azur playgrounds of the South of France—and one without a connection to Coco Chanel. The show took place on the roof terrace of Le Corbusier’s emblematic Cité Radieuse building, a mid-century high-rise social housing scheme, a utopian “machine for living,” whose interiors were designed by Charlotte Perriand. “It’s really an inspiring place you’d like to live,” she exclaimed.The chalky pastels, concrete grays, and grid-patterns of the architecture insinuated themselves into the tweed checks, mixed in with Viard’s light plays on seaside tropes like loopy open-work knits, diagonal ‘waves’ running down a skirt, and a gold necklace strung like a fishing-net. The rain lashed and the wind kicked up—the curse of the outdoor resort presentation in early summer.
It blew around the sea-creature printed ruffles and the delicate patchwork lace dresses (reminiscent of the antique nightdresses Viard said she remembers being sold in markets in the south of France in her teens.)
2 May 2024
There was a fashion moment in the early 1970s when nostalgia-crazed kids started to escape into vintage style. Fashion frequently looks back when times are bleak (does this sound familiar?) but the cultural upshot, circa 1972, was wildly positive, fizzing into Glam Rock, David Bowie, languid attenuated maxis, glittery things and platforms for all. Virginie Viard smartly pinpointed that “crossroads of the ’70s and the ’20s” at Chanel. It took her to the boardwalk at Deauville, dressing models in huge straw sun hats with turned-back brims, tons of maxi-things and suede platform boots: “the silhouette of David Bowie, and the magnetism of stars walking on the sand,” as the press release had it.It says a lot for Viard that her collection—certainly the best she’s done—picked up the spirit of Gabrielle Chanel in the ’20s, infused it with some of the retro-languid influence of Karl Lagerfeld’s ’70s, and brought its relevance into focus under a digital landscape projection of the beach at Deauville. Also: Her collection wasn’t overshadowed by the magnetism of Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz in a wraparound wall projection of a new short film (view ithere), trailered beforehand.Gabrielle Chanel started her business as a milliner in a shop in Deauville, the fashionable French seaside resort. Hence the symbolic connection Viard drew with the turned-back brims of the the sun hats. Her translations of Chanel’s earliest, revolutionary jersey signatures flowed into state-of-the-art modern knitwear in multiple versions of belted cardigan pajama-like trouser suits, and made sense of the ease of the house tweeds in long-line coats and, later, the fluttery, vaguely ’30s-via-’70s chiffon prints.It felt, for the first time, as if Viard had found an unforced connection with the original intention of Chanel—to make chic clothes easy for contemporary women.
5 March 2024
Lightness, prettiness, and girly frivolity—Virginie Viard gathered up all these values and presented them as the Chanel spring haute couture show. Although she’s never one to follow a theme to the letter, Viard’s background idea was ballet, threading it through a leggy collection that circled around a giant installation of a Chanel button.The show began with an obvious curtsy to Gabrielle Chanel in the chiffon Pierrot ruff worn by Margaret Qualley over a cream tweed jacket, a tiny pelmet skirt overlaid by a longer white tulle skirt, and thick white tights. (The actress had starred in the season’s teaser film—a mini fantasy about a missing Chanel button made in collaboration with Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free—that had just been projected in the space.)The collection ran from white to fondant pastels and back again. By look 3, the connection to dance was flickering through the silhouette of a tweed twinset of sorts—a cropped jacket whose matching under-piece was shaped like a leotard. If you hadn’t cottoned onto the dancer idea yet, the confirmation fully arrived with one of the show’s highlights: a nipped-waist, full-skirted black coat-dress puffed out on a stiff white ballerina tutu.What clients of the house look for in its super-luxurious haute couture is the ineffable wonder of handwork. Craning forward, you could see some outstanding techniques: a cropped-jacket beige suit that appeared to mimic open-weave tweed made of something that may have been raffia embroidery; a pink chiffon dress with a shirred bodice and some flyaway, textile-arty bows mixed up in its skirts.The finale, of course, was the Chanel bride. She had on a tiny silver-white tunic for a dress with poetic balloon chiffon sleeves and was trailing yards of white tulle as a train. Romantic, decorative, but grounded in a kind of contemporary reality. That’s Virginie Viard’s style all over.
23 January 2024
Chanel taking to a street in Manchester, the post-industrial metropolis 160 miles from London in northern Britain, caused all sorts of a kerfuffle. Why? Virginie Viard revealed her own personal backstory for choosing to support the proudly edgy multi-layered working-class culture of the English town, and it included everything from its prowess in football to the Madchester music and clubbing scene (as it was famed in the ’80s and ’90s) to its historical status as the original powerhouse of textile mill manufacturing in the 19th century.“I like small towns,” she declared. “Not like London—it’s too much like Paris. My grandfather and grand-uncle managed the football team in Lyons. My grandfather and grandmother also worked in making fabrics there.”So there she nailed some of the unlikely multiple cross connections between her roots and the French luxury house (Lyons being her provincial hometown, the traditional supplier of haute couture fabric manufacturing), as well as to Coco Chanel herself, who apparently fell for English-made tweeds when she was involved with the Duke of Westminster and spending time at his Eaton Hall country estate outside Manchester. Then, there’s Viard’s own-generation love of Joy Division and the all the gritty music and arts energy that’s been characterizing this Northern rival to London since, well, forever.The Northern culture immersion began with a Chanel invitation to a Manchester United v Chelsea football match the night before the show (itself a North-South gladiatorial contest). Guests were issued with personalized No 5 (as in Chanel No 5) Man U red football jerseys to cheer on the home team. Result: Man U 2, Chelsea 1. Things kicked off to an auspicious start.Rain is the other thing Manchester’s famous for—think of L.S. Lowry’s paintings of ‘matchstick’ people bent against the weather as they trudged to work in the mills. Right on cue, it poured down for the Métiers d’ Art show. Throngs of umbrella-wielding international guests took to pub-style outdoor seats along Thomas Street, a typical red-brick neighborhood strip of bars, record shops, tattoo parlors, and independent businesses Chanel-ified with a roof covering for the night.The Northern-girl interpretation was styled with a knowing wink to working-class ’60s-to-’80s pop culture, all side-flicked fringes and bare legs (Manchester types being nationally famed for defying the cold). Viard’s known for bringing a sense of the real and the youthful to Chanel.
She played with variations on tweed suits, knee-length to A-line minis, cycle shorts under coats, Beatle caps, and chain belts. Then came the New Wave club girls, some clad in black patent leather—treated to some sort of cool rain-spattered effect—others in baby-doll dresses with bodices embellished with double-C safety-pin or vinyl-record jet embroidery.Karl Lagerfeld instituted the Métiers d’Art shows to display the craftsmanship of the specialist couture supply—houses that Chanel owns. Lesage elaborates the embroidery, Goossens the jewelry, Lemarie the feather work, Montex the embroideries, and Barrie the Scottish cashmere knits. Viard had fun with souvenir slogan-sweaters, beanies, and scarves inspired partly by football terraces, partly by club flyer graphics.It was all very Chanel and very Parisian, of course; she never strays that far from the house classics. There was also kind of a faithfulness to the smartness standards of Manchester women and girls. Even when money’s been tight—on factory-worker wages—being turned out well, dressing your best to go out has always been the way of this city. One way and another, it was a show that did the city proud.
7 December 2023
Virginie Viard evoked a picture of an easy-living French vacation—a casual summer walk around a Chanel wardrobe, lightly inspired (more later) by the Villa Noailles in the south of France. The point is this: Viard’s Chanel is much more centered on her sense of a young woman’s lived experience than themed. This collection had a relaxed look from the start, all flat sandals, slouchy tweed caftans, bathing suits with caped faux beach-blanket cover-ups, and all kinds of elaborately elevated pajama-y things and denims to follow.Every look came with a pile-on of accessories: sunglasses, strands of pearls worn as necklaces or belts, cuffs and multiple fine gold chains. It was a wonder all of this didn’t come off as ’80s excess, as Karl Lagerfeld famously played it. The difference with Viard’s take on jewelry is to make it fine, almost skimpy—closer to the way that girls today wear ‘personal’ talismans and souvenirs as keepsakes.A hundred years ago Gabrielle Chanel was living in another era and moving in very different circles, but she was the one who first set the fashion for mixing up cheap costume jewelry with ‘real.’ It’s a rule: all roads at Chanel lead back to Coco.Which brings us to the 1920s avant-garde culture and friendship group Gabrielle Chanel shared with Charles and Marie-Laure Noailles, the wealthy art patrons who commissioned Robert Mallet-Stevens to build their early modernist Villa Noailles at Hyeres in 1923. Marie-Laure was a client of Chanel’s couture house. An exhibition devoted to this collector of arts, crafts and epoch-making designers is part of the centenary celebrations which are in full swing at the Villa. The house at Hyeres has long been converted into a center for contemporary art festivals. For almost a decade, Chanel has been the main sponsor of the Hyeres International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories. Karl Lagerfeld became its artistic director in 2015, while Viard, who was then his right-hand, chaired that year’s round of the festival’s fashion jury for its prize for emerging designers.It was surely Viard’s affectionate salute to Lagerfeld’s passion for photography that made her dot Chanel camera bags among the plethora of accessories—he once shot a photoessay on the Villa. Its Cubist gardens inspired Viard’s checkerboard patchwork patterns and the geometrically stepped hemlines on pencil skirts.
A triangular cut-out Deco-era reference winked from the necklace Gigi Hadid was wearing as she walked in a black lamé wide-legged pajama suit. It was a little bit 1920s to the eyes of fashion historians, but also very simply of the now.
3 October 2023
Couture on the quai,en plein air. It was easy to get swept up in the everyday-idyllic atmosphere of Virginie Viard’s massed stroll of Parisiennes along the Seine. There they were, walking nonchalantly in their block-heeled Mary Janes, just as if wearing haute couture to walk the dog or pick up some flowers at the market were most the most normal thing in the world.Viard’s approach is Chanel as lifestyle. Sans high-flown concepts, jokes, or theatrical gimmicks, her focus is on capturing the essence of Frenchness. “Sophistication and simplicity, permanence and beauty” were phrases in her press release. She went about portraying it down to faithfully reflecting the inimitable French beauty standard: perfect-not-perfect, apparently unstyled hair and au naturel makeup.The parade was led by Caroline de Maigret, best-selling author of “How to be Parisian Wherever You Are,” owning chic in her long, double-breasted navy tweed coat, hands trust in her pockets. The daywear—narrow coats, the red tweed Principal boy jacket worn by the dog-walker, the knee-length suits and slightly Mod trouser suits—toggled somewhere between the ’80s and the ’60s.Among them was a navy flecked tweed coat dress which stood out because of its edging of pale chiffon ruffles—because what you’re also craving to see at Chanel haute couture is the wonder of its savoir-faire. These techniques need to be seen close up, and explained in detail to understand the skills, the hours and the arcane refinements of the materials. At a distance, some of it did shine out across the quai: the gilded, patinated surface of a skirt suit, the 3D chiffon flowers in a dress glimpsed inside a plain coat, more flowers embroidered in multicolored sequins on the eveningwear. In the finale, a pale café-au-lait chiffon party dress was lightly whipped into ruffles at the neck and finished with a black bow—a youthful confection that could only come from the Chanel’s atelier flou.
4 July 2023
Sixteen years ago, give or take a week or two, Chanel staged its second-ever cruise show in Los Angeles. Models spilled from the doorway of a private jet branded with the house’s double Cs onto a runway that wrapped around a Santa Monica airplane hangar. At the time, it was a jaw dropping display of brand power—the French house had not yet begun building over-the-top sets for its ready-to-wear and couture shows at the Grand Palais in Paris; the famous iceberg collection, for instance, was still a couple of years away.With apologies to the late, great Karl Lagerfeld, that resort 2008 happening had nothing on the spectacle the house put on at the Paramount Studios lot tonight for resort 2024, what with stars including Margot Robbie, Kristen Stewart, Riley Keough, Issa Rae, and Marion Cotillard lighting up the front row, and a post-show performance by none other than the native Angeleno Snoop Dogg. Mixed in with the celebrity watchers, there was also a smattering of striking WGA members outside the lot urging show-goers to “tell Paramount to give writers a fair deal.”A 30,000-square-foot Chanel store, the brand’s biggest in the U.S., opened on Rodeo Drive last week. There are useful synergies to putting on a show here in LA, but the storytelling Chanel did around this resort collection was devoted to its Hollywood connections. Coco Chanel’s first trip to California was almost 100 years ago, circa 1931. She created clothes for movies by directors including George Cukor and Jean Renoir. During his 36-year tenure at the label Lagerfeld strengthened Chanel’s cinematic bonafides, befriending Penelope Cruz and Tilda Swinton, among many other actresses, in the process.Ahead of Viard’s show, movie billboards promoting it as a “One Night Only” event went up around town, making an explicit point about Chanel’s embeddedness in LA’s dominant culture. (Speaking of brand power, as this show was being prepared, Chanel was also busily involved in the Met Gala in New York, which honored Lagerfeld’s many decade career.) Every one of the show’s hundreds of guests also received their own mini version of the billboard, with their name in top billing: The suggestion: In Chanel everyone is a star, with light-up heel shoes to prove it.
As a matter of fact, Viard didn’t look at the silver screen or the red carpet for inspiration, but to what appeared to be a more quotidian example of Los Angeles: the Venice Beach boardwalk, a see-and-be-seen playground for roller skaters, weight lifters, beach bunnies, and epic sunsets. “I thought let’s do Jane Fonda, Cindy Crawford—all our heroines,” she said at the “accessoirsation” of the collection a day before the show. “There are jeans, a more aerobic feeling; every show is the occasion to do something we’ve never done before.”Viard’s stamp is the more feminine, youthful hand she’s brought to the house since taking over as artistic director in 2019, but the sporty vibe of the collection, with its leg warmers, wedge heel sneakers, running shorts, and swim tanks, plus the occasional skateboard, was something new. Think of it as a Chanel look for a star’s every occasion, including, in a serendipitous bit of timing, Robbie’s upcoming press tour forBarbie, which is shaping up to be the movie of the summer. Just one more propitious synergy.
10 May 2023
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the opening of “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Costume Institute, we are celebrating his talent by adding five newly digitized archival shows he designed to the Vogue Runway Archive. This one, for Chanel couture, was shown in July 1996 in Paris.Voguedeemed Karl Lagerfeld’s spring 1996 couture outing for Chanel so spectacular that “Ode to Coco,” a stand-alone Irving-Penn portfolio, was dedicated to it. It wasn’t just that the collection included a record-making dress that required 1,280 hours of work chez Lesage, the show marked a sea change in fashion. As Anna Wintour wrote in her editor’s letter, this collection” moved daringly and definitively away from the plain, minimal, and vulnerable look that has characterized so many clothes over the past five years” of the 1990s.Beyond the exquisite embellishments, the news here was the attenuation of the silhouette. “Elongated to death,” is how Lagerfeld put it to a reporter from Reuters. That meant longer hemlines, of course, but what made things streamlined and relevant to a fast-paced modern lifestyle was that almost everything was worn over what the designer called a “stiletto body [stocking]” made of a Spandex with a light sheen. Peeking out from under long coats they created an on-the-go feeling; and they breathed new life into classic 1930s silhouettes featuring the handkerchief-hems and/or black lace that Coco Chanel herself favored back in the day.Speaking of Coco, the Coromandel screens she collected provided the inspiration for the pieces that brought down the house: two red-and-gold and two black-and-gold sequin-embroidered coats with Asian motifs. A number of these were included in the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition at the Costume Institute in 2015; look for them also in “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”
28 April 2023
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the opening of “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Costume Institute, we are celebrating his talent by adding five newly digitized archival shows he designed to the Vogue Runway Archive. This one, for Chanel couture, was shown in July 1995 in Paris.Coco Chanel believed in restraint; Karl Lagerfeld did so only intermittently, but this Fall 1995 couture collection for Chanel was one of those times.The show seemed to reference the second phase of Mademoiselle’s fame, when after World War II, having been dismissed by the French for a liaison with a German officer, she was embraced by American women.The beginning part of the collection was devoted to the boxy cardigan suit that became the de facto uniform of well-heeled ladies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was a Barbie-like pertness to these perfect tailleurs that was reinforced by the dramatic hair, which was one part Totally Hair Barbie and the other Richard Avedon and Ara Gallant for Diana Vreeland.The name Chanel has been synonymous with the LBD (Little Black Dress) since the Jazz Age, but it was Audrey Hepburn in movies likeSabrinaandBreakfast at Tiffany’swho breathed new life into the look in the postwar period. Lagerfeld offered options for a cadre of Holly Golightlys, and Kirsty Hume assumed a mourning Jackie look.This was a collection with a happily-ever-after ending, however. Wedding attendants and a bevy of brides in clean-lined columns closed the show on a sweet note.
27 April 2023
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the opening of “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Costume Institute, we are celebrating his talent by adding five newly digitized archival shows he designed to the Vogue Runway Archive. This one, for Chanel couture, was shown in January 1993 in Paris.In 1993—the year of grunge—the future of couture in an off-the-rack world was once again being called into question. Though the economy was starting to recover from the recession that marked the first years of the decade, designers were toning things down, focusing less on decoration and more on silhouette and fit. “In the play-it-safe nineties, unadorned simplicity appears to be the answer,” wroteVogueat the time. (Think “stealth wealth” by another name.)Tailoring and flou, the binary that defines the couture, came together when Karl Lagefeld paired neat crepe with wafty, semi-sheer chiffon skirts. “I call it ‘transvisual’ couture; images from everywhere are mixed together in one silhouette,” the designer declared. Another pairing of opposites was more conceptual; writing about a navy topper,Voguereported, “the fabrication was clearly haute couture, Lagerfeld’s light hand in the jacket’s construction had its roots in his ready-to-wear collection for Chloé.”A passage of tweed coats worn with floral-print dresses and lace-up boots, noted the magazine, was Lagerfeld’s way of addressing “the individualistic spirit of fleamarket dressing.” In many cases crystal jewelry took the place of the more customary gilt and pearls.Coco Chanel was known for mixing her real gems with costume jewelry, and Lagerfeld leaned into this idea, asking the magic hands at Lesage to embroider on plastic that was turned into pretty pinafore dresses and some giddy finale looks with balloon-shaped overskirts. Lagerfeld always had a sense of fun.
26 April 2023
The camellias are out in Paris—ever the first optimistic sign of spring, despite this week’s frigid weather. Perhaps that’s one reason that Coco Chanel cultivated them as one of the signifiers of her house. She first pinned one of the blooms on a dress in 1923. Was a consciousness of centenary of the Chanel camellia in the back of Virginie Viard’s mind when she picked it as the center-piece of her fall ready-to-wear show?Viard had organized a giant symbolic white camellia as a set, and had a real one placed on every guest’s seat, but she wasn’t pressing the anniversary angle. “The camellia is more than a theme, it’s an eternal code of the house,” she said in her press release. “I find it reassuring and familiar, I like its softness and its strength.”A taste for propagating a contemporary realness around Chanel’s enviable Frenchness is more Viard’s thing. Like so many others this season, she opened with variations on black, white and gray. White camellias ran up a black trellis on a long, slim, tweed coat; they clustered as a corsage on slick black patent Mod-ish suits and popped up like polka dots all over cardigan jackets. From the minutest of embroideries to the button-shapes to the big, fuzzy angora pattern on a sweater, and swinging on multiple chain-bags, the flowers were absolutely everywhere.The formalities of the Chanel canon are constantly open to reinterpretation, as Karl Lagerfeld supremely taught. While staying within the guardrails of Chanel’s femininity and decorativeness, his former first assistant and successor has added her own dash of quirkiness to the mix. Some of the suits came paired with tweed bermudas, bloomers or leather shorts, teamed up with white floral lace tights and knee boots.Viard didn’t make a big play for evening—the finale was of camellia-print silk dresses, layered over sweaters and longjohns. This was more (perhaps like Nicolas Ghesquière’s collection for Vuitton) a depiction of what Parisian style might mean as worn by women on the street. It was good to see Viard extending her sense of reality to including mid-size models in that. As distinctive as Chanel is with its camellias, it’s a house that offers something for all women to buy into.
7 March 2023
What could a conceptual camel be doing at Chanel couture? This puzzle—the first sight to greet the audience as they walked in—can easily be solved by googling Coco Chanel’s apartment. What swiftly comes up are photos of Chanel at home in the Rue Cambon, with a model of a camel on a side-table, large bronzes of deer clustered around her fireplace, and lion effigies here, there, and everywhere. Virginie Viard held a tete-a-tete with the artist Xavier Veilhan to come up with a set idea for the spring couture show in said apartment and—you can picture it—they must’ve looked around and said to each other “let’s do the animals!”Hey presto! A playful idea that got Viard into the swing of a theme—a parade of something between cute Chanel drum majorettes, or perhaps, circus ringmasters. They flipped along in their short, flared suits with the odd top hat and bow tie, shod in little white cross-laced boots with Chanel’s signature black-tipped toes. By this time, they were walking around Veilhan’s menagerie of mobile animal sculptures—a horse, lion, deer, buffalo, bird, fish, dog, and elephant—which had been trundled out to join the camel.Still, it’s not in Viard’s nature as a creative director to push a concept over clothes. Instead, here was a collection of haute couture that felt youthfully relatable. The spectacle of her march of the majorettes simply became a device for freshening up the template of Chanel day suits, led out by a charming military-jacketed number in white.That was followed by varieties of abbreviated, gilded Chanel tweeds: a short trapeze coat, de-frumpified box-pleated skirts cut as minis, and then a tiny sugar-pink coat-dress with a stand-away collar. It was a bit ’60s Mod maybe, but not too obviously.Proceeding “not too obviously” might actually be Viard’s motto. So it was, when the collection switched from short and sweet daywear to long and slim evening. Within this sequence, there was a chic, neat, parma-violet short sleeved tweed coat, worn with white leather opera gloves, and long, body-skimming dresses in tiny polka dots, and black or white lace.Asked afterward if she’d been thinking 1930s with these languid dresses, Viard looked as if vintage Chanel collections hadn’t crossed her mind. “No,” she shrugged. “That silhouette might make you think it, but no.”Back to her reticence about committing to themes, again. Of course, there’s no rule that designers should have to stick to high concepts.
Sometimes, truth be told, they can really get in the way of designers just designing clothes for modern life. Instead, Viard is a “modern wardrobe for real women” kind of a designer. Her collections aren’t fantasy, even if she well knows how to conjure up the magic of the couture ateliers to make pieces that look like snowy, frothy whipped cream.And then, at the finale, out popped the bride from a hidden door in the elephant. She was wearing a little white dress entirely covered with embroidered doves and a white bow tie. It was a light-touch moment, simple and rather charming. Much like the spirit of the rest of the show.
24 January 2023
“Salam Alaikum Africa!” So sang Obree Daman, flanked by dancers from the École des Sables, at the start of what will surely go down as a milestone Chanel Métiers d’Art show both for the house that presented it and the country that hosted it.For Chanel to choose to present its first-ever show in Africa—and simultaneously the first show to be presented by any European or US houseanywherein Sub-Saharan Africa—was an ambitious move indeed. At a fittings appointment pre-show, backstage in the Senegalese capital’s former Palais de Justice (now home to its art Biennale), Virginie Viard said that the idea first took hold three years ago. Two years of Covid-enforced hiatus followed, before scouting began. “When we first came to this place, Dakar, it was really incredible, and we knew.” she said.As one of 800 guests you felt the experienced context of this show had been designed as precisely as the collection itself. The first stop post-arrival was on Gorée island, just offshore from the city, a place that was once a hub of the African slave trade under colonial rule and which is now a monument. There was a visit to the studio of sculptor Ousman Sowe, a tour of local artisan markets and an art-filled medina, and a “literary rendezvous” between Marie NDiaye, Charlotte Casiraghi, and Rokhaya Niang (alongside a performance by rapper Nix), plus a stop to see the beautiful furniture design of Ousmane Mbaye. Chanel’s President Bruno Pavlovsky announced a series of upcoming interactions between Chanel’s le19M and Dakar’s IFAN Museum of African Arts that will see exchanges of artisanal expertise between the two. As Pharrel Williams put it before the show: “There’s a serendipity in it being a French maison, and coming back to a place that was once colonized by the French, with a sense of equity… it’s a super-beautiful exercise in humanity.”
8 December 2022
Many have tried to decode director Alain Resnais’s beguiling/perplexing 1961 movie,L’Année Dernière à Marienbad. Thenouvelle vagueclassic features a couple who may (or may not) know each other, and who may (or may not) have been in some kind of relationship with each other. They move through a black and white dreamscape of ornate gardens and grand staircases, where time seems to have no meaning and words don’t seem to matter a whole lot either; only the occasional gnomic statement is ever uttered (as far as I remember; it’s been a minute since I’ve seen it). Still, female lead Delphine Seyrig looks utterly fabulous as she exists in this semi-somnambulistic state, thanks to some of her costumes having been designed by Coco Chanel.What most definitely doesn’t need decoding, however: As Chanel’s Virginie Viard looked at the movie while she was designing spring, it led her to create one exceptionally beautiful collection. Light, nuanced, and with a palpable sense of the here and now, it was Chanel replete with every element and fragment of the house. There were the tweeds, sparkly or ribbon embroidered or adorned with ostrich feathers; the chicest suits, cardigan jackets, and short coatdresses that looked as though they magically weighed next to nothing; boyish knits and teeny tap shorts; and exquisite evening dresses without an iota of fuss.Viard sketched these out in the archetypal black and ivory as well as a heavenly array of pastels, with very few prints, save for those that featured scrolling lines akin to what you might obsessively draw while daydreaming, or black-on-black interlocking logo double-Cs (look close to spot them), discreetly repeated over and over again on a softly rippling dress or fluid pajama pants. And to go with all of this: strands and strands of gilded or strass necklaces and drop earrings (perhaps wittily detailed with tiny thimbles); smaller versions of the iconic bags (most notably the pouchy, more casual Chanel 22); and get-ready-to-be-obsessed, glittery silver house-classic cap-toe slingbacks or grosgrain-bowed crystal booties, which look like the most glamorous (or glam-rock) ankle socks ever.Resnais’s classic wasn’t the only cinematic moment here. Viard had asked Inez and Vinoodh to shoot in Paris a short movie with Kristen Stewart, a kind of homage toMarienbad, as an opener for the show.
Stewart leaves a movie theater, wanders the streets of Paris, ascends the famous Rue Cambon Chanel staircase, takes the metro, all the while dressed in the spring collection, including one stunner of a long, sequined rose gold dress. It’s easy to understand why Viard is so entranced by Stewart; she wears everything with the most laid-back, offhand, unaffected ease. From what she toldVoguein an interview years ago, it was clear fashion matters most to her when it speaks to who she really is and comes stripped of artifice and affectation. You could say the same about Viard.Unlike the script forMarienbad, Stewart offers a more direct response when she’s asked about how she stays hopeful for the future. Burn your best yesterdays, she says, so you can start over. Viard didn’t do that, but she certainly delivered an effortless and optimistic vision of Chanel, past and present, blending it into one gorgeous, timeless today. Better yet, just to show how much she wants to really engage with the women who wear her clothes, she chose to embrace the diversity of female beauty by showing this collection on a whole variety of body types. In a Paris spring show season where that approach has been sadly all but absent, it was a welcome move. For this and so much else, brava, Virginie,brava!
4 October 2022
As this week has already shown, and with some influential names still to present, haute couture can mean very different things to different designers. A platform for a soaring imagination or a response to the zeitgeist perhaps, or a showcase for the technical artistry of the ateliers and thefournisseurswho supply those ateliers with extraordinary textiles, accessories, and embellishments.For Chanel’s Artistic Director Virginie Viard, her collections reflect the pragmatic needs and desires of the house’s clients and her own eclectic but never fantastical sources of inspiration. Not for Viard the sweeping statements of her mentor Karl Lagerfeld, who might impose a powerful new silhouette on practically every look in a collection, but instead a sense of gentle evolution and a myriad of references and inspiration sparks that might range (as in this collection) from a blinding memory of Inès de Fressange dressed by Lagerfeld in a jacket of bright grass green and shocking pink (for a 1988 Chanel couture show, when Viard first joined the house), to a shot of Fred Astaire in cinematic action, the tails of his white tie evening coat caught flaring out in mid-dance move, to a 19th century shot of a real-life Annie Oakley, to archive Chanel references from slouchy 1920s day suits to slithery 1930s gowns to prim 1960s tailoring, to Lagerfeld’s vividly impressionistic sketches from the 2000s.None of these references, however, are used by Viard in what the French call thepremier degré, that is, literally, but instead serve as starting points for outfits that evolve with the input of the textile designers and makers who weave those extraordinary painterly tweeds, and the dressmakers who understand how to make perfect pleats that “move beautifully,” as guest Sigourney Weaver enthused, “and are just so elegant.”That Astaire flare, for instance, might translate into the kick at the hem of a calf length skirt, the Oakley image into a dirndl skirt with practical pockets that encourage a certain assertive body language (and perhaps those sturdy short gaucho riding boots), the ’30s house archive references into slinky evening dresses deftly cut to fall straight to the floor when standing still, but that break into swirling movement below the knee when the wearer walks.To set the scene, Viard reached out again to the artist Xavier Veilhan who created a Constructivist set for the spring couture collection.
This time, Veilhan built a series of structures that formed a symbolic landscape (arches, bullseye targets, mobiles, cubes of bubblegum pink recycled plastics) in the sandy outdoor stadium of the equestrian L’Étrier de Paris center in the Bois de Boulogne. Guests walked through or around these structures before moving indoors to more sand and a set of kinetic color blocks in black, white, sand yellow, and gray. This gently suggested something of the art deco flavor to the drop-waisted dresses and linear shapes that appeared in some looks in the collection (and included an eye popping Taroni silk that Viard paired with a stylish bolero in stripes of black and white sequins and bugle beads).The symphonic soundtrack, created by Viard’s friend Sébastien Tellier, was set to a video projected on a giant screen as a backdrop to the parade of girls, an impressionistic clip that featured an varied cast including Charlotte Casiraghi and Pharrell Williams. That eclecticism continued with the clothes, showcasing amazing textiles—lace painted in resin; a shower of embroidered leaves on a white tulle trapeze dress, shadowing a print of the same motif underneath; an all-over deco print on a bell-skirted coat dress that on closer inspection turned out have been entirely beaded in sequins by Lesage; or tufts of ostrich plumes painstakingly applied to black chiffon and glimpsed through the openings in a streamlined trench coat of textured black tweed.Unfortunately, in this epic set and seen from a distance, many of those very subtle details, pointed out by Viard during a fitting in the Chanel atelier on the eve of the presentation, and so beautiful in the hand, were lost. What remained was a hypnotic sense of the gentle flow of pleats and of fabric dexterously manipulated by highly skilled hands so that the effect—achieved through years of know-how and savoir-faire—seemed effortless. In other words, pure haute couture.
5 July 2022
The day before presenting her Chanel resort collection on a sandy runway slicing through the pebbles of the Hotel Monte-Carlo Beach, the brand’s artistic director Virginie Viard was in a nostalgic mood. As she garlanded her models in jewelry dripping with gilded dolphins and sea shells—and the “Sac Monaco” in the red and white color block of the Monegasque flag—in the cavernous space of the hotel’s poolside Art Deco ballroom, Viard recalled many happy moments spent with Karl Lagerfeld in the monied, minuscule principality where he maintained an apartment and leased the extraordinary Belle Epoque villa La Vigie. It was on the terraces of this villa that Viard remembered Lagerfeld shooting Linda and Christy in the iconic sequin scuba jackets from his spring 1991 collection. “That was very funny,” she recalled, “I adore La Vigie. At the end I was here every year: for the Bal de la Rose, with Karl, [Princesses] Caroline, Charlotte, for shootings…We would always go to Rampoldi, Karl’s favorite restaurant.”It was those memories of Princess Caroline and her equally beauteous daughter Princess Charlotte (several of whose birthdays and whose wedding Viard attended, and who sat at the show next to French rapper Abd al Malik and across the pontoon from South Korean rapper G-Dragon) that infused the spirit of the collection, as well as a playful take on what else Monte Carlo means to the designer—“the casino, Helmut Newton’s girls, the car races...we like to play with all the cliches!” As Viard added, the inspiration drew on collective memories. Sofia Coppola, for instance, who filmed the resort collection with her brother Roman this season, remembered a family trip to watch Ayrton Senna race in the 1992 Monaco Grand Prix—“noisy, glamorous, exciting!” said Coppola—when they were all invited to stay at La Vigie. (“It was incredibly luxurious,” Roman recalled, “the linens! The beds!”)Thinking of those races by way ofCharlie’s Angels,Viard dressed her girls in a racing driver’s all-in-ones and mechanic’s overalls, although these were sequined and, perhaps, designed as trompe l’oeil jacket and pant combinations. There were silk prints of waving starter flags fashioned into drifting chiffon skirts to graze the ankles, and tweeds woven from images of massed cars on the tracks, abstracted on the loom into a shimmer of asphalt gray and brilliant primaries.
And for purses, how about an adorable mini full-face driver’s helmet? Sure to be high on the Chanel addict’s must-have list. (There are real helmets, too, if racing is your game, and number 5 your lucky number). There are also wrestling shorts, biker jackets, cricket sweaters, and tennis rackets if you are so inclined.The Helmut Newton inspiration, meanwhile, meant some sexy attitude in the shirt dresses slouched off a shoulder and a plethora of short shorts and minis that brought with them the promise of summer. The wonders of the 19M ateliers of craftspeople were reflected in touches like the bouquets of beautifully crafted silk flowers, an evening slink bristling with feather fronds (both supplied by Lemarié), and witty t-shirts sequined to suggest racing driver’s tops (sleeves branded with linking Cs), or scattered with pretty floreate embroideries by the storied houses of Lesage and Montex. “It’s very inspiring to be here,” said Viard, looking across to the pool and the Mediterranean waters to the high rise metropolis rising up the hills beyond, “It’s easy.” Just like Viard’s breezy collection and her uncomplicated vision for dressing today’s Chanel woman.
5 May 2022
The Grand Palais Éphémère was completely done up in tweed for today’s Chanel show: an earthy light brown for the seats, black with shots of pop colors on the walls, and a pale green for the runway, which was designed to represent Scotland’s River Tweed. The region was ground well-trod by Gabrielle Chanel; company lore has it that on her walks in the local countryside she gathered flowers and greenery as references for the colors she wanted from the fabric makers there.Virginie Viard picked up that thread for fall and tweed was at the heart of her new collection. Because we were in the countryside, she used it on multi-pocket hunting jackets and coats that incorporated downy-looking fleece and for slightly oversized men’s jackets of the sort Chanel lifted from her lover the Duke of Westminster. In photos taken at his lodge in Lochmore and on the terrace at his Eaton Hall country house she wears his borrowed clothes and rubber boots. Viard conjured that weekend getaway spirit with colorful thick-ribbed tights and rubber Wellies or thigh-high waders stamped with the famous interlocking double Cs. “There’s nothing sexier than wearing the clothes of the person you love. I’m fascinated by this ever-contemporary gesture,” she said in her press statement.Viard’s former boss Karl Lagerfeld made more than passing reference to Scotland in his own work. A memorable Metiers d’Art destination show took him and his team to Linlithgow Palace. But that collection’s brooding romance was replaced here with a vibe brighter and more upbeat, as is Viard’s inclination. She has a good sense for how young women want to wear Chanel for everyday, unpretentiously and with a lot of ease.The River Tweed aside, Viard had things to say about city dressing too. “I was also thinking about England in the 1960s, and very colorful record covers,” she said. Tweedy shorts suits tapped into that energy as did a pair of short leather shifts. The shiny black kitten heel skimmers the models wore could give the cap-toe slingbacks so beloved by the fashion crowd a run for their money.
8 March 2022
“It’s a summer collection, so it’s very fresh, even with a lot of embroideries,” explained Chanel’s artistic director Virginie Viard during a fitting in the Chanel studios on the eve of the showing of her thistledown-light haute couture collection. “I was inspired by the ’20s a little—the feathers, the fringe,” Viard continued, “the feminine side of the Constructivists, the girl inside!”To set the scene, Viard reached out to the artist Xavier Veilhan whom she met at the home of their mutual friend, musician Sébastien Tellier. “I always wanted to work with him because he did something for Chanel [fine] jewelry 15 years ago in Place Vendome, a great installation,” Viard said. “I love his work and I needed someone to work with for the sets—the way Karl did. Me, I can’t do that! He loves Constructivism, that kind of thing which is so Karl!” she continued. “In fact, I found some notes from Karl in Rodchenko and Malevich books that he always gave me—so many books and documents with notes on details that could be used for embroidery and so on. It was always Constructivist with Karl!”Veilhan, who was chosen to represent France in the 2017 Venice Biennale (for which he created, as he explained at the time, “an immersive installation that propels visitors to the world of the recording studio…inspired by the pioneering work of Kurt Schwitters, the Merzbau”), drew on this century-old, but still revolutionary period in art, for his Chanel set, with its giant spinning discs and sandy walkways, crafted from sustainable plywood and matting in his preferred (and appropriately Chanel) palette of black, white, and beige.Veilhan was “curious” about the commission, as he explained before the show, because “the invitation was very broad—[Virginie] wanted me to make something, but she didn’t want to tell me what. It could be a photograph, it could be a book, it could be something involving music—because in my work there is a lot of relation with architecture and music. She said, ‘I just want you to make something, but over two seasons.’ I think that in fashion there is always this idea of a relationship with history but also of always renewing constantly. As an artist I felt I could provide another relation to time.” The set he created springs from this thought, inspired by 1920s Wold Fairs and artists like Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
(The makeup was inspired by the pre-war era’s avant garde creatives too, although the dark circles around some of the models’ eyes looked more pugilistic than artistic).
25 January 2022
Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is celebrating the most wonderful time of the year by adding six magical—and newly digitized—1990s haute couture shows to our archive. Chanel’s fall 1997 collection, designed by Karl Lagerfeld, was originally presented on July 10, 1997, in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris.“This is what couture is all about—a celebration in tulle, lace, beading, and wrapping,” reads theVoguecaption accompanying Peter Lindbergh’s photograph of Trish Goff in a waft-y, jet-beaded gown of layers of mauve and smoke chiffon from Karl Lagerfeld’s fall 1997 couture collection, which referenced fin de siècle style and was inspired by Nordic fairy tales, art, and literature. (The designer returned to the storybook theme 19 years later when referencing the work of Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen atFendi.) The models wore their hair long and loose like the princess in the pictures of Swedish artist John Bauer.The Princess and the Trolls,by John Bauer, from the collection of the National Museum Stockholm.Photo: Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty ImagesLavishly romantic looks—many topped with great swaths of tulle and feathers, resembling upside-down bird’s nests or troll’s tresses, depending on your point of view—were balanced by others that had an almost ecclesiastic rigor, minus any coldness.
22 December 2021
With sweeping synergy, this season’s Métiers d’Art collection read like the limited Chanel edition of connect-the-dots. Virginie Viard invited guests to Le19M, the newly opened building devoted to the workshops of the maison’s artisans, where she presented her most crafts-centric collection within the very same architecture that had informed its cuts and motifs. “I feel like I’m back at school when I’m here,” Viard said after the show, and she’d get top marks for organization. Named after the arrondissement it inhabits, the triangular Le19M was designed by Rudy Ricciotti whose “concrete thread” façade evokes the intricacy of embroidered haute couture cloth. Viard echoed those lines—as well as elements from the building’s interior—in a collection she called “metropolitan.”You could see the façade’s organic grid-like structure in the tweed pockets that adorned the slender column coat that opened the show, and likewise on the tunic that followed. The idea was more figuratively suggested in the three-dimensional knitting of a purple crop-top-and-culotte ensemble, or the hand-spun gold ribbon embroidery of the top in exit 26. In the game of synergy, however, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s the reality for Lesage, Montex, Lemarié, Lognon, Goosens, Maison Michel, and Massaro—the heritage artisans now based at Le19M—whose painstaking, super time-consuming, beautiful pieces of craftsmanship are put into the world to contribute to a bigger picture:the full look.Placing these age-old practices in a contemporary context, Viard took that look to the streets—at least those left of the River Seine. Interpreting the Chanel branding through graffiti-like embroidery, she exercised her take on the logomania that’s increasingly filled the Instagram pages of 2021. A top nestled the double-C among floral appliqué, the same logo was playfully speckled on cardigans and trousers in fluffy silver embroideries, and the Chanel name appeared tagged in multi-colored crystals across the front pockets of a tweed blouson that evoked a sweatshirt. In a world where streetwear has taken on its own literal meaning—clothes for any street, everywhere—Viard was living up to the duties Chanel has set itself with Le19M: securing the survival of rare craftsmanship by connecting it to the future.You could say that’s the very raison d’être of the Métiers d’Art collection, too.
Supporting that point, mid-show the Korean top model Soo Joo walked off the runway and stepped onto a pedestal where she transitioned into her new pop star alter ego Ether. Alongside Oneohtrix Point Never—the vaporwave artist also known as Daniel Lopatin, who produces for The Weeknd—she performed her single “Haemin,” followed by the track 12.21 written specially for the finale. Michel Gaubert and Ryan Aguilar—Chanel’s musical supervisors—referred to the dance/trance orchestration as “exquisitely detailed music-making: sonic vignettes that kiss each other.” In that sense, everything came full circle on the Chanel runway: from streetwear to music, nowadays couture seems to be the magic word.
7 December 2021
Back at the turn of the 1990s, as listeners to the podcastIn Vogue: The 1990swill discover, supermodels came bounding down the high, raised runways exuding joie de vivre as they twirled and vamped for the photographers who had jostled for prime position, not only in the mosh pit at the end of the runway, but all along its length. (The front-row seats were still prized in fashion’s hierarchy, but generally gave one a fantastic view of the back of a photographer or a supermodel’s nostrils.)“I used to love the sound of flashbulbs going off at the shows in the ’80s,” designer Virginie Viard recalled in today’s Chanel show notes. “I wanted to recapture that emotion.” So this season Viard attempted to channel that energy and joy in a collection that not only referenced the era in the clothes, staging, and accessories (purses shaped like N°5 bottles; piratically flared Louis heels), but even the soundtrack: Witness George Michael’s anthemic “Freedom! ’90”—in a contemporary cover version by Christine and the Queens—getting the models in the party spirit.While the Grand Palais, scene of so many elaborately staged Chanel spectaculars, undergoes an epic renovation (generously underwritten by Chanel), this collection was presented in a temporary space, set up in the shadow of Les Invalides, which allowed Viard to recapture the memory of the shows she had thrilled to when she was a fashion neophyte.At the end of the raised runway, for instance, the photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, now deeply enmeshed in the Chanel world, played old-school show photographers, snapping the models who stopped to pose and preen for them and seemed to be having the time of their lives, flashing smiles and flicking hair rather than assuming the habitual look of sulky disdain. Inez & Vinoodh also provided the playful videos (presented in an anteroom before entering the show space) that depicted the stars of Chanel’s model cabal—among them Lily-Rose Depp, Alma Jodorowsky, Rebecca Dayan, and Quannah Chasinghorse—turning the camera on them. Photography, after all, is in the DNA of the brand.The show also opened à la Karl Lagerfeld—who sent shock waves when he put Chanel-branded underwear as outerwear on the runway for spring 1993—with a black-and-white sequence of briefs, swimsuits, and sports bras, occasionally veiled in spangled black net pants or shown with above-the-knee skirts.
During an accessories fitting a couple of days before the show, Viard pointed out the crocheted effects she had worked on with braid company Bacus, and the spin on the bright spring pastel tweed suits—think of Chanel-clad Naomi, Linda, and Carla, shot by Steven Meisel forVogue,March 1994—that she had given the twist of a longer skirt or jacket flap in back, suggesting a traditional tailcoat.“Karl was always doing fake jeans,” recalled Viard, shuddering at the memory. “In the ’90s they always seemed to be with pink tweed—ugh! For me it was horrible then, but nowj’adore!”Her own reimagined denim propositions this season included a pretty, summery deck-chair ticking stripe cut into stiff little 1960s-looking dresses with bold bands of black sequins, creating the trompe l’oeil illusion of a classic Chanel cardigan suit, and charcoal denim wafted with a butterfly print. Those butterfly wings were amplified as prints on drifting chiffon pieces that swirled as the girls twirled, providing another charming throwback to a moment that celebrated the happiness the fashion flock is feeling in a season of cautious reemergence and optimism.
5 October 2021
When she began thinking about Chanel’s fall 2021 haute couture, Virginie Viard was struck by a series of photographs of the arch modernist Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel dressed in throwback 19th-century bustles and crinolines for some of the society costume balls that were all the rage in the 1930s. In that menacing era, these parties might have been a form of escapism, but as we now look to a post-pandemic future, and as Paris couture week unfurls in a flurry of dinners and in-person gatherings, Viard’s gentle romanticism suggests optimism instead.In a preview in the Chanel studio on the Rue Cambon, Viard also spoke of two women artists, the acclaimed Impressionist Berthe Morisot, sister-in-law of Manet, and the Cubist Marie Laurencin, a key figure in the cultural landscape of Jazz Age Paris, whose delicately colored works include a portrait of the young Coco Chanel herself. In the haute couture, God is in the details—even the exquisite buttons mimic artist’s palettes or Monet nympheas, crafted from mosaics of tiny colored rhinestones, while feathered blossoms bloom under the stiff brims of Maison Michel felt hats.These painterly inspirations came together in a collection characterized by a lightness of touch. Viard encouraged some truly remarkable work from the great embroidery houses of Paris, including Lesage, Cécile Henri, Atelier Emmanuelle Vernoux, and Atelier Montex, and the feather and flower designers Lemarié. These masters cleverly emulated an Impressionist’s bold, impasto paint strokes à la Van Gogh, or delicate pointillist dabs à la Seurat to create small works of art evoking gardens of rose blooms or fringes of dahlia petals. Lemarié’s incredible gardenia-strewn cardigan jacket (Look 21), crafted from feather strands, took 2,000 hours of expert handwork as Viard pointed out during a studio preview. But magnificent as these pieces are, they are as weightless as thistledown, embroidered on tulle and chiffon.That airy spirit continues in the quirky way Viard marries bouffant skirts or even suits—made from “tweed” woven from narrow strands of multi-colored tulle and ribbon—with delicate bustiers of pale pink broderie anglaise or chalky lace, and lingerie-light chiffon and lace camisoles and bloomers that she aptly calls her “little deshabilles.”Meanwhile, a trio of cream pantsuits, styled with boas of Schlaepfer’s tinsel sequins—and hairdresser Damien Boissinot’s plaited faux-hawks—hint at Viard’s rock chick edge.
The bride, however, prettily personified by Margaret Qualley in a stately dress of soft pink satin, recalled the house’s pre-WWII era, worn as it was with a black pillbox hat accompanied by a veil scattered with clustered multi-colored sequins, based on one worn by Gabrielle Chanel herself in a 1930s pastel portrait sketch that now hangs in the Chanel studio.As the girls lined up backstage in the galleries of the Palais Galliera fashion museum, currently hosting the remarkable exhibitionGabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, Viard’s clothes suddenly found themselves in dialog with Coco Chanel originals from the 1920s and ’30s, a garden of handcrafted beauty.
6 July 2021
For her graphic Chanel cruise collection Virginie Viard sought inspiration in Provence, that beautiful region in the south of France lapped by the marshy Camargue and crowned by the hills of Les Baux-de-Provence, considered one of the area’s loveliest villages. Specifically, she set the collection in the Carrières de Lumières (Quarries of Light) in Les Baux, a series of chalky, cave-like rooms—the spaces left behind after centuries of excavations.These vast chambers have recently been used to present resonant sound and light shows evoking the world of various artists including Vincent van Gogh, who found inspiration in the local landscape. (Charlotte Casiraghi, hosting a literary salon during the presentation, has spent much of her life in nearby Saint Remy).In 1960, however, Jean Cocteau—the sui generis artist, poet, and filmmaker who cast a long shadow across the worlds of culture and style in 20th century France—used these quarries as a setting for his hauntingly beautiful movieThe Testament of Orpheus. It’s “so modern, so fresh, and so strong,” says Viard, who watched the movie, which features Cocteau himself, with cameos from his lover Jean Marais, Pablo Picasso, and Yul Brynner, among others, as she began working on the season. “The movie really inspired the collection,” Viard added. “When I came to see the quarry again—I’d been years ago, before it was used for theson et lumiere—I saw that the clothes had to be strong, and black and white. Otherwise we could be in Petra or Egypt. I love ruffles for the couture,” she continued, “but I thought it would not look modern here.”Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel counted Jean Cocteau amongst her intimates; he produced some evocative portraits of her and illustrations of her clothes, and in turn she costumed productions of his playsAntigone,Orpheus, andOedipus Rex. The friends would often hang out in Chanel’s daytime apartment on the Rue Cambon, and Viard was excited to read the letters that Cocteau sent to Chanel. The apartment has recently emerged from an extensive restoration, and Viard sought inspiration in the very personal bestiary that Chanel assembled there: The lions for that famous Leo, camels, doves of peace, fauns, and the female sphinxes that all appear in objects and sculptures in the apartment have been reimagined as graphic prints on denim with a hand-painted look, and as lucky charms used as embroidery in the new collection.
4 May 2021
After years of epic Chanel show spectacles in the vast Grand Palais, now closed for renovations, the brand’s artistic director Virginie Viard felt that the time was right for a totally different ambiance to showcase her playful Coco Neige collection. “I wanted to show in a small place, a club,” Viard explained during a Zoom preview. “I don’t like big rave venues; I prefer that kind of place that is more intimate. Karl was always telling me about the shows he staged in the ’70s with the girls getting dressed on their own in a restaurant in Paris,” she added.Viard lighted on the legendary Left Bank nightclub Chez Castel that has been the epitome of cool for generations of party animals since Jean Castel first opened the club in the 1960s. Cozily arranged on different levels in an 18th-century building or two, the dimly lit boîte on the rue Princesse attracted the likes of Françoise Hardy, Françoise Sagan, Amanda Lear, and Mick Jagger at the time, and has never gone out of fashion. “I love Castel because it’s like a house and very English,” said Viard who was amused by the idea of the Chanel girls coming down the club’s famously narrow stairs in their giant après-ski coats and then leaving them in the coatroom to reveal the skimpy little chiffon numbers underneath. Even Viard’s shaggy Moon Boots turn out to be double layered so that the voluminous shearling can be removed to reveal a sleeker boot beneath.Viard played with the marriage of sturdy tweed and fragile chiffon throughout the collection, inspired, as she explained, by the legendary style of the late Stella Tennant, a Chanel icon for so many years, and a woman who embodied the chic of a certain school of aristocratic negligence as she shrugged a hefty tweed coat, built for the Scottish moors, over a delicate evening dress.The collection is infused with “ski spirit”: Norwegian sweaters, quilted salopettes, voluminous puffers, and ski pants worn with short cropped jackets that Viard has styled either with the midriff bared or with the nightclub-friendly flowered black lace camisoles that also crop up under fluid knit suits or paired with a 2/55 quilted satin miniskirt. There are midi-length crochet skirts, and suits shined with panels of sequin fabric and layers of fringing at the cuff.Viard was also inspired by Chanel’s fall 1994 collection, which featured conspicuously fake-fur suits and coats, and reimagined the pieces in black, white, and hot pink shearling.
She said that she had been watching Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s iconic 1985 video for Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love,” featuring the fabulous models Christine Bergström, Marpessa Hennink, and Laurence Treil—she even cast the young French model Lola for her resemblance to the wonderful, wide-mouthed Treil—and her last look, a gold trench coat, styled with a felt fedora (with shearling flaps), might have stepped right out of it.The soundtrack, mixed by Michel Gaubert, also featured Diana Ross’s “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?—a song that Viard considers singularly apt for this moment. “Your own pajama party?” posited Viard as an answer. “As we can’t do anything else!”
9 March 2021
This season, Chanel’s creative director Virginie Viard was hearing wedding bells on the rue Cambon—not her own, she’s been happily partnered to composer Jean-Marc Fyot, the man she describes as “my fiance,” for a quarter of a century—but instead the bells ringing for a marriage party composed of her haute couturecabine, some 32 models in all.These are not, as Viard says, the conventional fancy nuptials one might expect from a Parisian couture collection, but instead “more bohemian style—more a wedding or a family celebration in a village than at the Ritz!” complete with “the mother and the aunt, [and] the 15-year-old girl dressing up for the first time”—the latter in a tiny little grown-up black dress of spangled black tulle worn with 1980s opaque white tights.There are also boys at this wedding, or rather girls who, in Viard’s words, are “a littlegarçonne” and dressed in old fashioned boys’ clothes—tweedy Oxford bags, and waistcoats for instance, a reminder of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s appropriations of menswear in her designs, and her literal borrowing from the wardrobes of her lovers including Boy Capel and the Duke of Westminster. The mother of the bride, meanwhile, has some chic little suits in silvery embroidery and lace to choose from, or a skinny shrunken cardigan jacket embroidered by Vernoux, while more adventurous guests might opt for a lace jumpsuit or a tiny tweed coat dress with a ruffled overskirt to tie on like an apron. There are “a lot of flounces and petticoats,” says Viard, as though the Gypsy Kings were playing at the celebration and the guests in those big tulle skirts were going to spin around the town square. “There is a masculine/feminine side to the silhouettes,” she adds, and the fairy-tale grandeur of these pale net ballgowns is brought into the real world when those skirts are paired with white boyfriend shirts, or singlets of crocheted chiffon, worked by the embroidery house of Montex.To set the scene, the Grand Palais has been transformed this season to evoke the charm of a country wedding in the South of France (the sunshine bright enough for the guests to wear Jacqueline Onassis–scale sunglasses), with rustic arches wrapped in flowers, wooden chairs for the socially distanced guests, and coronets of silk as well as real flowers in the hair—the first time, as far as Viard knows, that Lemarié, fabled for their exquisite artificial flowers, have also worked with the real McCoy.
26 January 2021
Like many French schoolchildren, Chanel’s creative director Virginie Viard was taken on an educational tour of the storied Chateaux of the Loire. At the time, she was more impressed by the splendors of Chambord than the more intimate charm of the fairytale Château de Chenonceau. Revisiting Chenonceau earlier this year, however, when the castle was planned as the setting for an in-person Métiers d’Art show (it has subsequently become virtual), Viard was struck by how closely the atmosphere of the place evoked La Pausa, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s own fabled house in Roquebrune in the south of France.The 16th-century Chenonceau is known as the Chateau des Femmes (the Women’s Castle) because of its association with some powerful ladies through its storied history, notably Diane de Poitiers, the influential mistress of King Henry II, and her rival, Catherine de Medici, the king’s Italian-born, taste-making wife. The chateau is flanked on either side by gardens created by De Poitiers who is said to have maintained her legendary beauty by bathing in the River Cher. Viard took the flowers and parterre designs as embroidery motifs, reimagined with what she playfully describes as a touch of Disney.Viard was especially impressed by the chateau’s kitchens: De Medici, after all, was said to have transformed the French culinary landscape. It was also De Medici who expanded the relatively small castle by building a vast gallery room that served as a bridge over the river. It was in this astounding room, with its distinctive black and white checkerboard floor, that the Métiers show was staged. No wonder that Viard was thinking of something “a little princess-y!” with this collection.During a Zoom preview, the designer wondered, “Did Chanel really admire the women of that time?” The 1930s portraits of Coco dressed in dark velvet suits with white piecrust ruffs at the neck evoking the court artist François Clouet’s portraits of De Medici and her ladies that Viard was rifling through certainly suggest that Chanel appreciated the “magnificent simplicity” of the period. “You can find so many details,” notes Viard. She was astounded to discover, for instance, that Catherine de Medici’s symbol, repeated throughout the chateau, is a linked doubleC—very similar to the iconic Chanel logo that is so much a part of the brand’s DNA. (Viard has worked with photographer Juergen Teller this season to document many of these potent details).
3 December 2020
The Chanel show set, in Paris’s soaring Grand Palais, spelled the brand’s name in giant letters, evoking the iconic Hollywood sign in the Santa Monica mountains.Did this suggest that creative director Virginie Viard was thinking of the movies? “Less movies than actresses,” Viard explained, and particularly the modern life of actresses, from the high production values of the red carpet, to a staged off-duty look whilst getting a Starbucks in the certain knowledge that a paparazzo might be lurking in the parking lot, “the whole process!”Meanwhile, the accompanying movie teasers, produced by Inez and Vinoodh, literally brought Paris to Tinseltown, with the Sacre Coeur nestled proudly in those Hollywood Hills—symbolic of Viard’s marriage of Parisian cool with laid-back, #WFH L.A. style.The house of Chanel of course has a century-old relationship with actresses, as the recently opened exhibition “Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto” at Paris’s dedicated fashion museum the Palais Galliera (intelligently curated by Miren Arzalluz) revealed. The exhibition subtly integrates a number of Chanel garments worn in private life and on-screen by some of the 20th century’s fabled actresses—including Grace Kelly, Delphine Seyrig, and Jeanne Moreau—as well as the voice of Marilyn Monroe, who when asked what she wore in bed famously answered “Chanel No. 5.”Marie-Hélène Arnaud in Chanel. Photographed by Henry Clarke,Vogue,March 15, 1959
6 October 2020
“I was thinking about eccentric girls,” says Virginie Viard of her fall haute couture collection for Chanel. In particular, Viard was remembering Karl Lagerfeld heading off to parties with his sometime muse, the madcap Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon, who as a teenage debutante got herself an American crewcut to give some punk edge to the pretty but detested pink dress her mother had chosen for her coming-out ball. “Life with her around is the ideal for me,” Lagerfeld said of de Beauvau-Craon when he spoke withVogue(“The Country Girl,” June 1990), “because life must never be flat. She gives a light spirit, yet she is deeply spiritual.”After the austerity of the spring couture, inspired by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s schoolgirl uniforms at the Aubazine convent, Viard wanted to swing to quiet opulence for fall in an edited collection of 30 looks. Because the collection will largely be seen through photography (Mikael Jansson shot the look book, and haute couture clients will also receive a portfolio of more documentary and detail images), Viard was thinking of “things that maybe I would not do in a show—punk hair, fine jewelry.” Those Chanel haute bijoux include yellow diamond lions (Chanel herself was a Leo), and Viard notes that “I adore tiaras!”In fact, the only costume jewelry used in the collection are the cabochon stones from Goossens—the storied Paris house whose founder Robert Goossens collaborated with Chanel in the late 1950s. Viard uses those iconic, Byzantine-inspired jewels as embroidery elements on a jacket of black and white tweed. Tweed figures large in the collection for day and night: a knee-length tunic worn over boot-leg pants, for instance, or a minidress with the traditional Chanel braid trim reworked in rhinestones. There is more amazing trompe l’oeil in the allover Lesage embroidery of a lean jacket worn with an ankle-length skirt, or in the Emmanuelle Vernoux–embroidered sleeves of a decorous wool ball gown, or the Montex sequin and wool tufts of an off-the-shoulder minidress. Ten looks are made using tweeds made from fantasy yarns from Vimar 1991, another luxury fashion supplier that Chanel has recently acquired to add to its stable of such magical names as the embroiderers Lesage, Montex, and Cécile Henri, and the plumassier Lemarié.Viard is also keen to showcase the miraculous work of the greatfournisseursof Paris, but she does it with an understatement that seems perfect for the moment.
The de Beauvau-Craon touch erupts in the form of a short frothy taffeta dress and faille ball skirts, or a full-skirted retro cocktail dress of flowering black and white lace spliced with lacquered pink lace (Viard calls it “ma poupée,” “my doll”)—and in punk feather mohawk bangs worn in the hair, and the lace-up court shoes that would have been perfect for dancing the night away in the great ’80s nightspots Les Bain Douches and Le Palace.But Viard provides subtle elegance too, in pieces that include a sheath of inky faille with bishop sleeves or a solemn evening gown of steel gray silk velvet, discreetly dusted with embroidery at the waist and cuff, and jackets with midriffs defined by hand smocking (and worn with all-in-one stocking pant boots). Viard aptly describes the looks as “casual and grand”—and this is well-behaved couture that whispers but never shouts.“Haute couture?” queries Viard. “It’s forever; it’s for always.”
7 July 2020
Chanel could not host a presentation this season due to the coronavirus pandemic. In these extenuating circumstances, Vogue Runway has made an exception to its policy and is writing about this collection via photos and remote interviews.The Chanel cruise 2021 collection was originally intended to be shown on Capri, the mythically beautiful Italian island a ferry ride from Naples. It remains, however, a place that Chanel’s creative director Virginie Viard still has yet to visit. Instead, as Viard explained from her desk in the Chanel atelier on the Rue Cambon, where I joined her for a “virtual accessorization” (the styling ritual just before the full looks are documented), she traveled there in her mind to create the collection that she calls Balade en Méditerranée [A Mediterranean Jaunt]. Meanwhile, photographer Karim Sadli, working with Viard’s sometime-muse, the uber cool model Mica Argañaraz, created the illusion of a Caprese sunset in Chanel’s Paris photo studio.Viard spent lockdown in her French country house, a time, as she says, for “rest and family time,” that was no holiday. In addition to preparing this resort collection (which she had begun before lockdown), Viard was also working on a capsule haute couture offering, which will likewise be presented virtually. Viard returned to Paris and the Chanel studio on May 4, when the city partially reopened, but in the depths of the countryside she was thinking and dreaming, as she told me, about “summer in Capri—or the South of France,” and the kind of destination wardrobe of “easy clothes” that “a sophisticated but also cool girl would want to travel with.” Her proposal includes swimsuits to wear as bodies under cardigan jackets, wide-legged pants, or handkerchief-hemmed skirts, and no-nonsense iterations of the classic Chanel suit or saharienne jackets in cotton tweed.“There are no evening dresses, no heavy things,” says Viard, who proposes instead some day-into-night options including those bathing suits printed with scattered trompe l’oeil Chanel costume jewels and worn with skinny cardigan jackets and wide pants in a fine-gauge knit (woven with a camellia pattern jacquard), or bandeau tops embroidered by Lesage with flowering branches of bougainvillea—that emblematic Mediterranean summer flower—that that can be worn under suits or veiled under sheer black chiffon blouses.
Elegant little wisps of dresses in silver lamé, bordered in the signature house braid in the same fabric are as dressy as it gets.
8 June 2020
“Freedom!” declared Virginie Viard during a fitting in Chanel’s rue Cambon atelier on the eve of her breezy show. Viard explained that she was talking about the sort of wind-in-the-hair freedom that a horse rider feels as their steed bounds through the landscape. That idea of liberation translated into a collection of unforced, woman-friendly pieces that embraced the house codes at the same time that they reinforced Viard’s own pragmatic instincts for comfortable, insouciant, no-nonsense glamour. Viard took her inspiration from a turn-of-the-1980s photograph of Karl Lagerfeld and his sometime muse Anna Piaggi, both dressed in the height of Edwardian-revival finery. In that image, Piaggi is shrouded in a veiledDeath in Venicehat, and Lagerfeld wears a morning-dress-stripe jacket and vest, a floppy black silk cravat, jodhpurs, and a pair of sturdy riding boots—an image that for Viard represents “strong romance.” Viard reinterpreted Lagerfeld’s chunky-heel boot and styled it persuasively with every single outfit in the 72-look collection (a tight edit by house standards), from a thickly knit cardigan worn with a cropped white cotton evening dickey and micro shorts to liquid black velvet evening gowns. (There were also a plethora of riding-stock cravats but only one black velvet riding hat.)The horse motif appeared in a lace woven with a repeating image of a rearing Pegasus and more subtly in strips that suggested the satin armbands of a jockey’s silks, set into the sleeves of a tweedy jacket or coat. This detail was inspired by an amazing discovery recently made by the archive sleuths of Chanel. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s passion for horse racing apparently began with her romance with the dashing polo player Boy Capel, and eventually she owned racehorses herself. Those sleuths have recently unearthed a set of racing silks worn by the jockey who rode the designer’s horse, an animal that she named, with singular aptness, Romantica. Coco Chanel’s racing color of pink appeared in the collection alongside a pale stem green, the only colors in a rigorous palette of black and white, aside from the cabochon jewels of the Byzantine costume-jewelry belts and necklaces that Chanel herself loved and that Viard translated into intarsia knits that recalled the famous embroidered Christian Lacroix jacket onVogue’s groundbreaking November 1988 cover.
Those jodhpur pants, meanwhile, were designed to open at the side leg with a series of press-stud closures—and were styled in the show to flap open over the boots and the hosiery figured with signature interlocking Cs. The branded press studs were a cool replacement for the house’s signature buttons on skinny, soft-shoulder jackets and coat dresses. Zippers, however, sliced into below-the-knee skirts and roomy coats (crafted from a patchwork of different tweeds of the same tone) so that they could be opened—as in the show—to reveal tiny shorts or midriff-baring bustier tops in the same fabric. Details such as the scalloped edges on a creamy tweed skirt suit; knife-pleat ruffles forming the collar on a taffeta raincoat; a white lace blouse flocked in inky blue velvet; and a flurry of pale feathers creating the illusion of the season’s leg-of-mutton sleeve on a loose-fit jacket added more Edwardian prettiness and hard romance to the collection.In the show, some girls came out in pairs or groups of three, and it was refreshing to see them smiling and chatting to each other like conspiratorial friends, wearing unpretentious clothes that seemed to have stepped right out of their wardrobes to make sense for modern lives.
3 March 2020
Virginie Viard’s Chanel haute couture presentation saw us in the romantically overgrown garden of a cloister, set somewhat miraculously in the chilly immensity of Paris’s Grand Palais. The setting suggested a key element in Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s legendary story. Chanel was 11 years old when her mother died, and as her wayward father—a traveling salesman with a supposed wandering eye—was often away, it was decided that she would be sent to the convent of Aubazine in the remote French region of Corrèze. Here, her unusual and impoverished situation meant that she was among the girls singled out to wear an austere black-and-white uniform, one that she would adapt through the years to dress the richest and most stylish women of her age.In imaginative retellings of her autobiography, Chanel would refer to the convent’s strict and unforgiving nuns as “aunts.” These taskmasters nevertheless taught the young Chanel to sew and thus gave her the tools to forge a life as an independent woman for herself in later years. The aesthetic of the convent stayed with Chanel forever. Her distinguished future biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux saw in the designer’s “yearning for austerity” or in the moments when she “waxed nostalgic for all things white, simple, and clean, for linen piled high in cupboards, [and] whitewashed walls,” references to “a secret code.” In fact, Charles-Roux posited, “Every word meant only one word: Aubazine.”Fully aware of the biographical significance of the convent in Chanel’s life, and to her aesthetic, Virginie Viard made a pilgrimage to Corrèze on a gloriously sunny day last September.“Karl didn’t like those things,” Viard explained backstage at the collection as the models were lining up like so many well-behaved schoolgirls in their prim, Claudine-collared coats and blouses, and old-fashioned black patent schoolgirl shoes with built-in white ankle socks. “He always said, ‘Oh, it’s ugly, ugly!’ But I said to myself, Imustdo this.” The visit proved inspirational; “I loved it,” Viard recalls, “it was full of charm.” In fact, she was so moved by the cloister’s unkempt garden that she immediately decided to recreate it for the evocative decor of the haute couture set in the Grand Palais, creating an enclosure of dozens of antique linen sheets hung up as though freshly laundered by the girls and the nuns to dry in the breeze.
21 January 2020
Chanel’s Virginie Viard titled her Métiers d’Art show “Paris-31 rue Cambon” for the fabled street where Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel first set up shop as a milliner in 1910 (“Chanel Modes” at Number 21), and where she later expanded her fashion empire to embrace six additional 18th-century buildings, with her legendary haute couture salons at Number 31. To emphasize that we were chez Chanel, Viard evoked Coco’s legendary apartment—a study in black, beige, crystal, and old gold that is still preserved intact exactly as she left it at the time of her death in 1971—and the famous mirrored staircase (down which her mannequins once used to glide, and where Chanel herself sat, hidden from view, to spy on the reactions of her clients seated in the salons below). As Viard explained backstage before her show, the celebrated decorator Jacques Grange is about to embark on a major renovation of those salons, so instead of showcasing her collection there, she recreated the spaces in the chilly immensity of the Grand Palais. “I adore the apartment,” Viard added, and she evidently found inspiration in this setting where Chanel retreated from the running of her house and entertained friends (the feisty designer maintained a bedroom across the street at the Ritz Hotel). Viard described the collection as “the things we like, a mix of Karl and Chanel—the codes.”Viard wove elements from that apartment into details of the clothes themselves. The ears of wheat from the gilded sheaves that Chanel kept for good luck were embroidered onto filmy black tulle cardigans shrugged over lean black crepe jogging pants, and on a short evening dress lavished with ropes of pearls. Elsewhere, motifs from the ancient lacquered Coromandel screens (that Lagerfeld famously reproduced for a series of Lesage-embroidered coats in his Fall 1996 couture collection) were used as luxe frostings on pocket flaps and cuffs.The Métiers d’Art collections showcase the wondrous work of thefournisseursor luxury suppliers of the fashion industry—embroiderers, feather and artificial flower makers, milliners, custom shoemakers, et al.—many of which Chanel has acquired to keep them operational and the skills alive. Viard, who directed the Chanel studio under Lagerfeld for decades, has a fine appreciation of what these ateliers are capable of.
Witness the pepper and salt tweed suits with hems that look as though the fabric itself has been fringed but turn out to be feather fronds instead, a bolero of broad feathers overprinted with a shadowy pattern of Chanel’s iconic camellias, or a feather blazer worked into a subtle trompe l’oeil plaid. There were tricks of the eye, too, in garlands of jeweled belts and necklaces that proved to be embroidered onto the top of a hip-slung skirt. Viard uses thefournisseurs’ artistry with a subtle hand to embellish clothes that riff on the work of Lagerfeld but have an unforced wearability that is closer to the spirit of Gabrielle Chanel herself, and an era when fashion shows presented a wide offering of options for their varied, multi-generational clientele. So while Viard eschews the emphatic silhouettes, witty gimmicks, and giddying season-spinning newsiness of her predecessor, she focuses instead on uncomplicated, client-friendly clothes that have a more timeless appeal—a proposition that may prove a more modern approach to making clothes.As the chandeliers freighted with rock crystal and amethyst drops were lowered to evoke the rue Cambon salons, the first models down that sweeping staircase, for instance, wore classic boxy black coats in chunky wool as coat dresses and tied with chiffon sashes lavishly embroidered in gold and jewels—a pretty notion for extending the life of a coat. The show’s monochrome opening and finale sandwiched a burst of blazing makeup tones of hot pinks, burgundies, and corals, worked in everything from cardigan knits to ombré chiffon prints. House stalwarts such as shadowy black chiffon and lace evening dresses, or slinky ivory charmeuse evening shirtdresses were all cut pragmatically to the ankle so that nothing trailed on the beige carpet. There might have been whimsy in the birdcage purses and in the tour de force of Chanel’s famous 1932 diamond jewels rather miraculously embroidered onto a strapless short evening dress composed of glossy black feathers, but this is essentially a collection of pragmatic, beautiful, and, of course, luxurious wearables for women who don’t want to think too hard about their clothes, and how they will work with their active lives.
4 December 2019
The eternal and international attraction of being a French girl with “the knack” has been a thread that has run through some of the major Parisian houses and their major “experiential” shows this season. Virginie Viard, in her first ready-to-wear outing since the passing of Karl Lagerfeld, followed suit with her practical breakdown of a Chanel wardrobe for a young woman. It was up in the air in one way: on a set evoking the gray, zinc-lined rooftops of the Rue Cambon; and down to earth in another: a contemporary girl’s how-to instruction kit grounded in the heritage of Coco Chanel.Up on the roof chez Chanel, a flat-heeled procession of leggy girls set out in tweed playsuits, tiny silk shorts,garçonnecoatdresses, and little bell-shaped skirts. Where Lagerfeld might’ve thrown on funny, punning accessories, Viard’s instinct was to strip back and emphasize the essentials of silhouette and tweedy Chanel textures in a relatable context—who could dare mimic his wit, after all?She said in a press release that she’d drawn a connection between the rooftop scenery and the “atmosphere of the Nouvelle Vague”—the French New Wave cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, famous for portraying young actresses in the honest light of real life. Kristen Stewart’s new biopic of the life of Jean Seberg had gelled that idea in her mind. At one point, an echo of Seberg’s T-shirt and jeans (the actress’s classic appropriation of French working-class style in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 movieBreathless) inspired a neat casualization of a Chanel twinset as a Breton-striped cropped jacket and sweater with high-waisted cropped denims and a chain belt. On the other hand, wasn’t it Coco Chanel who thought up that combination on the Riviera in the 1920s?What we look for in Chanel as a storied couture house is to be reminded of—and thrilled by—that sort of time-traveling relevance. The tiered, tufted layers of the plays on tweed (the inimitable magic of the in-house textile department) that appeared among all the flouncy skirts Viard sent out did that as well. Ditto a couple of Chanel mini coatdresses, one with a silver sequined flip of a skirt, the other tailored, navy, with silk ruffles on the collar and pockets.At the end of the day, who doesn’t want to belong to the ranks of the Chanel It girls? When a tweed-suited girl with a hat jumped up from the audience and jauntily swung her quilted Chanel bag in step with the models, plenty in the audience thought she was a preplanned punch line to the show.
Not at all. It was a prank by 28-year-old French YouTuber and comedianMarie Benoliel. The security guards didn’t like it, and the models soon realized she was an imposter. But then again, she was perfectly dressed, and everyone in the auditorium laughed along with her. You couldn’t help thinking how Karl Lagerfeld would’ve been amused, because isn’t that the essence of what Chanel girl actually wants to be today—chic and a lot of fun?
1 October 2019
For her debut haute couture outing chez Chanel, Virginie Viard set her collection in a library inspired by the one in Gabrielle Chanel’s daytime apartment on the rue Cambon (the legendary designer slept at the Ritz next door), with its chic buff- and conker-colored bindings, and by Galignani, the storied bookstore on the rue de Rivoli that numbered bibliophile Karl Lagerfeld among its foremost clients. The models moved at a more leisurely pace than usual through this contemplative environment to a soundtrack created by music maestro Michel Gaubert that included Portishead’s “Glory Box” with its lyric “I just want to be a woman.” Although Gaubert insisted the music had been chosen for the “more casual” feel of the presentation after Lagerfeld’s fast-moving, high-octane pyrotechnics—and the introspection of the library environment—it seemed an apt complement to this woman-friendly collection.Self-effacing as ever, Viard didn’t appear to take her bow after the show; instead she was backstage being congratulated by her teary-eyedpremiers d’ateliersand the greatfournisseursof Paris—the embroiderers, feather artists, button and ribbon makers, et al.—who have collaborated with her for the three decades that she worked alongside Lagerfeld as his studio coordinator at Chloé and subsequently Chanel. The savoir faire that Viard developed over that time with these wizards of technique and craft was on display in this quiet collection, which revisited the Chanel tropes developed by both Mademoiselle herself and subsequently by Lagerfeld, including skinny coatdresses to the ankle that flashed luxe silk satin linings as the models moved; full-skirt velvet gowns cut to romantic ballet length or grazing the floor about flat shoes; and tiered chiffon Jazz Age dresses with stitched pleats released into fluttering fullness. In place of Lagerfeld’s hard geometry, Viard added her softer touch in the rounded volumes of a magenta bomber jacket worn over a minidress with a cool Parisienne, retro-’80s vibe; in the surprise of tweed dungarees; and in shapely jackets (some with gentle leg-of-mutton sleeves) with face-flattering ivory satin collars or organza ruffs, worn over wide oxford bags of the type Chanel herself carried in the 1930s.
Viard’s skill in harnessing the genius of the flou and tailoring ateliers and suppliers was revealed in touches such as a diaphanous T-shirt embellished with white plumes bearing written poems; a bolero jacket formed from clustered feather “roses”; textiles that looked like tweed but on closer inspection proved to be solid embroideries; and the liquid flow of acres of pale mauve chiffon made into a strapless evening dress that rippled like the waters of a stream in movement. It was a collection that almost felt anti-fashion but was instead an ode to flattering elegance that should keep the pampered Chanel couture clients happy.
2 July 2019
The mighty house of Chanel is now a double-legacy brand that carries the DNA of both Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld, fashion giants who between them shaped the way women wanted to look for a century and more. It is a giant ship to steer, and in her debut outing at the helm, Virginie Viard kept it on an even keel in tranquil waters—appropriately enough for a Cruise collection. Travel was very much on Viard’s mind, and the heft of the great Chanel machine was in evidence in the incredible evocation of a dining carriage in a pre-war train, and a Belle Epoque café (“Le Riviera”) that resembled Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon perhaps, with potted palms and paintings set into elaborate boiserie and plasterwork panels suggesting the glamorous destinations the train might take you when it chugged out of the station (all of them settings for past Chanel collections).Here, in an atmosphere that evoked the sort of ambiance Chanel herself would have been familiar with as she prepared to speed off to La Pausa (the monastic house she built for herself in Roquebrune on the French Riviera in the early 1930s), breakfast was served for guests at the first of two shows, and lunch for those at the next. The collection itself was presented downstairs in the great soaring space of the Grand Palais. Although there were train tracks here, there was no train—wisely, because who could eclipse the steaming trains of John Galliano’s sensational Fall 1998 Haute Couture show for Christian Dior, or Marc Jacobs’s no less astounding Fall 2012 presentation for Louis Vuitton. Viard instead transformed the vast space of the Grand Palais into a train platform, the audience seated on old-fashioned benches, waiting expectantly, and the building’s existing Art Nouveau architecture successfully evoking a turn-of-the-century train station for giants.Viard worked alongside Lagerfeld at Chloé and then for more than two decades as his indispensable studio director at Chanel, and her technical savoir faire and the lessons she learned from the master were much on evidence. In place of Lagerfeld’s hard-edged geometry, however, Viard brought a new softness and ease to the Chanel silhouette, reflecting her woman’s perspective and something of the insouciance that Chanel herself believed in.
3 May 2019
In a show that was somber yet serene, a capturing of airiness and substance, of shrugged-on elegance and insuppressible delight, the farewell to the immense talent of Karl Lagerfeld was framed just as he’d imagined. He took us to a place high in the mountains on a beautiful day. It was a snow-bound haven—a slice of Chanel heaven, viewed from a distance that was poignantly difficult to bear.There was an icicle-like tinkling on the soundtrack. Models assembled, one by one, on the snow-covered steps of a faux alpine hostelry, the Chanel Gardenia. It was hard, the suppressed anticipation of what was going to happen next. What is the correct form for honoring someone at a fashion show, someone who was always so fixed on waving away vulgar sentimentality, and who always had something hilariously skewering to say about the posthumous hagiographies of anyone he cared to mention? Karl Lagerfeld was the least sentimental of people. He loved his job and always regarded it as the task of continually living in the present. He reveled in letting it be known he had a “contract for life” with Chanel, which he enjoyed to the maximum moment.Well, this is how it went. There was a minute’s silence. And then, Karl Lagerfeld’s voiceover, from a recent Chanel podcast (this manlovedevery tech advancement). He spoke in French, until the last sentence, where he burst through in English about his pleasure in imagining the detonation of a surprise on an audience in, “Oh! It’s like walking in a painting!”The Chanel girls—his crew, the latest generation he’d encouraged and quipped with in the Chanel studio since 1983—were clearly conscious of the ceremonial responsibilities they had. They trod the “snow,” hands in pockets, insouciantly proving what a perfectly considered collection of wide-legged trouser suits these were—with long, swirlingly soft, checked tweed coats he’d envisaged in tandem with his longtime right-hand Virginie Viard.That section was amazingly poised. Tailoring is a subject du jour, but through the filter of Chanel consciousness, we saw tradition, femininity, and an energetic projection of the shape of today. Let’s put it down here: The opening, some of the wide, pleated trousers, was incredibly on point—a flipping of the Chanel tradition of opening with tweed skirtsuits—with playful snowballs of tulle and crystallized snowflakes thrown into the back of the girls’ hair.
5 March 2019
Snow might have been falling outside the Grand Palais in sub-zero Paris, but inside, Karl Lagerfeld transported us to a sun-baked Italian villa with terra-cotta urns of oleander flanking an inviting pool, and cypress and palm trees shading sandy pathways, stone balustrades, and a sweeping stair.In his serene collection Lagerfeld looked to his beloved 18th century for inspiration. The protean designer was particularly inspired by the exhibition “La Fabrique du luxe: Les marchands merciers parisiens au XVIIIe siècle” (through January 27, 2019) at the enchanting Musée Cognacq-Jay, a small museum in the heart of the Marais. The exhibit focuses on the Parisian merchants who supplied the wealthy of the 18th century with luxury goods of all sorts—from silken ribbons to gilded picture frames to sumptuous furnishings—an activity showcased in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s 1720 paintingL’Enseigne de Gersaint, set in one of those dealer’s shops. King Louis XV’s tastemaking mistress Madame de Pompadour was preeminent among the patrons of these establishments. Having seen the exquisite work of the German Meissen factory, La Pompadour rallied the French porcelain works at Vincennes to create similar china flowers so that her splendid houses and dinners could be supplied with her beloved flora in the winter months when her gardens had died back.Lagerfeld summoned the amazing skills of the French couture suppliers to evoke those flowers in feathers and hand-painted sequins, even using dried flowers dipped in resin, that were embroidered or applied to materials running the gamut from airy organza, chiffon, and lace, to gleaming leather and the house’s signature handwoven tweeds. In other examples of tour de force workmanship, lace was hand-painted or iced with silicone whorls to suggest blue or pink and white china; tulle was shredded into strips so fine that it suggested a cloud of swansdown trim at the cuff and hem of a suit ensemble or was plaited and sewn into dense grids over a base of filmy lace to create the illusion of plaid when seen from afar. Evoking the delicacy of the pieces that Lagerfeld created for Chloé in the 1970s were dresses composed of tiers of finely pleated silk chiffon, each layer with a slightly wider gauge of pleat toward the hem—a subtlety only noticeable up close.The lean tailoring, meanwhile, focused on a firm, angled shoulder line to the jackets and pencil-slim skirts that sometimes exploded into kick pleats at the calf.
That narrow silhouette was occasionally broken with a flurry of asymmetric ruffles, or loops of fabric (or even ostrich feather fronds) draped into panniers to suggest an 18th-century silhouette. This being the haute couture, some of those loops were lined with solid crusts of embroidery, an extravagance only partially revealed in movement.Lagerfeld more or less dispensed with revers altogether (as Mademoiselle did in her famous cardigan jackets), creating gentle bateau necklines by turning the collars back or extending them into looping origami folds that were seamed into the waistlines of his shapely jackets and coats. With that inviting pool in the middle of his set, Lagerfeld’s bride wore a swimsuit for her nuptials, but this being Chanel haute couture it was encrusted with a dense embroidery of silver flowers.On that playful note, the girls filed out for the finale to the exuberant strains of Mina singing that classic 1972 Italian hit “Parole Parole,” but Lagerfeld did not emerge to take his customary bow, and his absence sucked the air out of the room with the sharp collective intake of breath.In his stead, he sent his invaluable studio director Virginie Viard, who coordinates these wonders of the couture atelier, so certainly deserves her moment in the sun.
22 January 2019
With the magnificent setting of the 10 B.C. Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the backdrop for Chanel’s latest Métiers d’Art show, Karl Lagerfeld was thinking of a chic mash-up of Ancient Egypt and New York itself. The collection was designed to showcase the small miracles wrought by the house’sfournisseurs. These embroiderers, feather workers, button-makers, costume jewelers, fabric weavers, milliners, and shoemakers are flourishing anew thanks to Chanel’s taking their once waning ateliers and supporting them under the company’s Paraffectionsubsidiary.To set the scene, the moat that surrounds the temple in the museum’s dedicated gallery had been planted with thickets of papyrus, the structure itself partially hidden from the view of guests by a high temporary wall to create a more dramatic sense of arrival to this most storied of Manhattan landmarks, albeit a relatively recent implant. (In 1963 the temple was removed from its site in the flood plain that would soon be created by the Aswan Dam and subsequently gifted to the United States by the Egyptian government in recognition of the help provided in rescuing it and other monuments threatened in the same way.)Lagerfeld opened the show with variations on the super-scale jackets he first presented at Chanel’s Spring 2019 ready-to-wear show, but this time he cut the skirts to rise slightly in front in imitation of the shendyt, or wrap-around kilted skirt, worn by men in Ancient Egypt and so familiar from the period’s hieroglyphs. In a further nod to the period, he layered these suits over slim, ankle-length sheath dresses of ivory gauze, like the kalasiris worn by Cleopatra and her ladies. Those famous Chanel tweeds were flecked with lustrous gold—Lagerfeld, who can never resist a play on words, called itluxe orto sound like the storied city on the Nile. And in another antic play on words, he indulged in some prints and motifs drawn from the Memphis Group, the 1980s artist and designer collective headed by the protean Ettore Sottsass and named for the ancient Egyptian city, whose work Lagerfeld himself commissioned and collected back in the day.Added to the palette of gold and ivory were coral and scarab blue—and scarabs themselves appeared in jewels and in giant form as evening minaudières.
The alligator and python effects in this collection were also trompe l’oeil: They are now created from stamped leather or even from scale-shaped discs of sparkle; Chanel announced on the eve of the show that the brand will no longer be working with crocodile and exotic reptile and stingray skins.
5 December 2018
Who wouldn’t kill to be at the C-side right now? Karl Lagerfeld’s invitation to a tropical beach, complete with fake waves, gave Chanel’s global audience an uplifting mini break. For all the insane illusionary grandeur of the set, it was a show of real and relatable fashion—a blissfully easy trip bringing us back to the heart of Parisian chic.Shoes kicked off, Chanel’s models reminded us of the central question in fashion that has gone adrift in these confusing times: Who would you like to be? Gazillions of women will testify an answer in chorus: a carefree French girl, please.Lagerfeld’s showsur la plagereconnected us with all the solutions that Coco Chanel first invented to boost female social confidence. There has been a lot of avant-garde-ish discussion about designing around bourgeois classics this season—beige, ladylike suits; silk dresses; chain bags; logos. Mademoiselle Chanel had a hand in writing those rules. Lagerfeld—who keeps young people around him constantly—intuited exactly how to work that to full advantage.The show observed Chanel through the enthusiastic lens of a girl who loves stealing her mother’s oversize ’80s tweed jackets, suits, cropped cashmere sweaters, and quilted chain bags. Talk about athleisure and the newly arrived trend for leggings and cycling-slash-scuba shorts? Ha! Karl Lagerfeld first took Chanel to the surf in 1991 with his scuba-and-tweed collection. Yes, it made waves.Don’t mention it to him now, though. His mission is keeping Chanel in a permanently relevant present. Double quilted bags. Little A-line dresses with Chanel-chain straps. Fabulous Provençal raw-edge straw hats. Is it all pop culture marketing? When the section of lemon-colored silk dresses constructed with micro pleating and inserts of Chantilly lace breezed through, clearly not.Asked if he was thinking of reprising that reference, Lagerfeld responded with a classic zinger: “When did you say that was, the ’90s? I wasn’t born!”Hilarious riposte. There’s a school of thought—dwindling—that fashion doesn’t need to be deeply meaningful. It doesn’t, just as long as it’s this well-made—and this amount of fun.
2 October 2018
Should Karl Lagerfeld ever find a moment to tear himself away from his books and his drawing pads and happen to look out the windows of the sleek spaceship apartment that serves as home for him and his beloved cat, Choupette, he would see a magnificent view of the Seine and the green-painted wooden stands of the boquinistes plying their trade of old books, prints, and magazines, as they have for centuries in this powerfully evocative place.For the Chanel Fall haute couture show, Lagerfeld evoked that view—with its wide sidewalks and low stone walls framing the magnificent Institut de France, built by Louis le Vau for Cardinal Mazarin in the 1660s (and where the Academie Française is housed)—and sent out a collection whose steely coloring and focus was an homage to the city that he has known since the 1950s.“I came to live here when I was 18,” Lagerfeld remembered during a fitting on the eve of the show, recalling a city still suffering from postwar neglect, with “dirty streets” and dark, unrestored buildings. “People said to my parents, ‘But he can get lost,’” he added. “My mother knew better: I had a strong survivor instinct!” Despite the city’s drear, survivor Karl fell in love with it—and the affair has proved enduring.The collection’s tweeds, failles, and chiffons evoked the nuances of the city’s greige stone facades beneath smoldering gray skies, lit by astonishing embroideries that sparkled like the lights of the bateaux mouches on the Seine, and showcased the nonpareil workmanship of the great fashionfournisseursthat Chanel has acquired to ensure its flourishing survival. “High fashion is about Paris, huh?” queried Lagerfeld, and certainly no one makes clothes like the Chanel couture atelier.This season, he has built everything around what he calls the “high profile”—long skirts that unzip to the thigh to reveal provocative miniskirts beneath. “You can wear it zipped down when you visit your banker, no?” said the designer during a preview, “and zipped up when you see your lover after!” The narrow sleeves unzip to the perfectly defined shoulder, too, revealing silk and chiffon linings quilted by hand to resemble the signature Chanel purse—a refinement that only the wearer would appreciate.And the refinements don’t stop there: Those unzipped skirts reveal a crusting of embroidery on the miniskirt beneath.
The same silver foil that heats a weary marathon runner was plaited and woven and plumped with air to create a light-as-thistledown ball-gown skirt, worn with a black velvet sweater licked with glossy black plumes. A black velvet coat swung in movement to reveal that its lining is discreetly—but entirely—encrusted with hand-beaded pink pansy blooms. Perfect chiffon pleats, meanwhile, were trapped over the hips and broke out into fullness below.
3 July 2018
Is it to do with the aura of political confidence—and youthful charm—that Emmanuel Macron is announcing around the world that the three big Paris fashion houses (plus Gucci) have decided that France is the place to show their Cruise collections this year? Chanel, Christian Dior, and Louis Vuitton have all ceased their far-flung travels and opted to treat their clients to immersive French experiences this season. Karl Lagerfeld wasn’t at the reception for fashion designers that Macron threw at the Elysée Palace in October (as it fell on the night before the Chanel ready-to-wear show), but he’s been vocal about how highly he rates Macron and his wife, Brigitte. How much he thought about sailing with the fair winds of Macronics behind him is pure speculation, but the fact is that Chanel got in first, with a Cruise show that stayed put—the temptation is to say, anchored—in Paris. Why leave the city, when you’re able to command the construction of a vast model of a passenger ship in the Grand Palais, and ask everyone on board?The clothes read both as a sentimental journey around the ’80s, when Lagerfeld began designing for the house, and of the signatures—quilting, tweed, sailor pants, pearls, Scottish cashmeres, camellias—that Gabrielle Chanel brought to fashion in the first place. The vast imitation ship was named La Pausa, after Chanel’s summer house in the South of France, while a press release steered attention toward the fact that Coco Chanel was essentially the first designer to make vacation clothes for wealthy clients, first in the resort of Deauville in 1919, and how she later built on that success to introduce the firstcroisierecollections at her house in the Rue Cambon in Paris in the late 1920s. Essentially, it was the first lifestyle collection, suited to the leisured classes’ penchant for sailing around the Mediterranean in the summer months—which the super-rich still do, in droves. A young Chanel client, fully habituated to the scene, declared it “everything I’d like to wear when I get on a boat—the short dresses, the sailor pants, the prints. Easy.”What that customer liked was “the femininity” of the shapes, dealt out with an ’80s-flavored rounded shoulder, cropped jackets, and an emphasis on the waist, and the ultra-leggy lengths. It was a client-pleasing collection, then: white patent quilted bags, rope fisherman’s totes, and all.
After the show on the dock, Lagerfeld came out to wave to the audience with his longtime studio designer Virginie Viard. Then the gangplanks went down, the audience were bidden on board, and the set turned into a party ship, with oysters on deck and Captain Karl holding court in an imaginary white ballroom. A landlocked fantasy to kick off the journey around France. Next stop, Dior.
3 May 2018
“I’ve always loved autumn. This is a kind of Indian summer, with all the leaves. It’s a beautiful mood.” Karl Lagerfeld had conjured a forest into being at Chanel. It looked as if the fallen leaves of every park in Paris had been scooped up and brought in to carpet the Grand Palais against a photographic backdrop that stretched the forest to trompe l’oeil infinity. Where, we asked, was he thinking about? No forest in particular, he said, but then added, “I was brought up in the country, on an estate which had 12allées[of trees] going from the house.”The contemplation of nature as a fashion show experience has been on Lagerfeld’s mind for the last two shows in this place. He planted a formal French rose arbor in this venue for Couture, and grandiosely threw up the cliffs and roaring waterfalls of the Gorges du Verdon for his last ready-to-wear show. And, in between, there was his terrific Métiers d’Art show in Hamburg, the German seaport of his birth.À la recherche du temps perdu?Well, it wasn’t that in any literal sense. Still, as the lines of girls began treading purposefully through the moss-strewn glade, the first long, slim black coats struck a quintessentially Lagerfeldian note: the attenuated Edwardiana silhouette that has reflexively dashed off his pen for decades.There were six of them in varying shades of Chanel chic. One was double-breasted and flecked with gold Lurex. Another, a doubled-up look of a collarless tweed over a leather liner (an on-target trend of the season). Then the last: two coats sprouting coq feathers, and then a full-on swathed-sleeved version that somehow evoked both early movie-star glamour and the 1980s.Karl Lagerfeld in a nostalgic, romantic mood? There were vaguely ’70s-esque dresses you could call that—billowy sleeves, high necks, peasant-y leaf prints. Pretty. But Karl Lagerfeld isn’t someone who designs in the rearview mirror. More than a generation ago, way before Kaia Gerber was born, Karl Lagerfeld was dressing supermodels in Chanel sequinned scuba-suit jackets and mega-size hip-hopCC-logo jewelry in the ’90s. It is no surprise to find him tuning into the current puffer trend, then serving up several versions for the young, rich, and today. This offering included a couple of white nylon tweed-trimmed Chanel jackets. You can totally see Chanel’s customers wearing them, customers who turned up in force to photograph themselves before this show began.
6 March 2018
Karl Lagerfeld has an optimistic read about the changing atmosphere in France under President Emmanuel Macron. “It’s the feeling I have, and the mood,” he explained. As a foreigner in Paris, he says he can sense a shift: “The stranger can say, ‘This is French’ better than the Frenchman.” Besides, he knows Macron and his wife, Brigitte. “I met him when he wasn’t even in politics. They are very good people. Not pretentious. He’s very popular,” Lagerfeld added.It sounds silly to say, but the presentation of the Chanel Haute Couture show was unpretentious, too. The set was a classic French garden with a fountain, sandy paths, and rose-threaded pergolas. In other words: You knew where you were—not on your way to the moon in a Chanel rocket or sitting in awe at the foot of a roaring cascade in the Gorges du Verdon. Instead, the garden trope took us back to what the couture season in Paris used to be: a breath of spring wrapped in a prettiness designed to lure customers to Chanel HQ on the Rue Cambon.Lagerfeld said he’d been led by spontaneity, without preplanning: “I’m not a marketing person; I don’t know what I’m doing in a way—it’s just a feeling.” The silhouettes did read that way—as dashed-off pastel-themed varieties in passages of Chanel tweeds, chiffon dresses, and eveningwear. They ranged from voluminously wide to tiered to perpendicularly slim and narrow. The prettiest came last: tiny metallic minidresses, veiled with a covering of chiffon to the ground.
23 January 2018
We all know it: When you’re going back to your hometown, you’d better do it right, yes? Karl Lagerfeld was born in the northern German city of Hamburg, a major European shipping port. Tonight its most lauded, world-famous son returned with a slam-dunk of a Chanel Métiers d’Art show—a collection anchored in the seafaring character of the town on the River Elbe. He’s been away for a very long time, Karl, but psycho-geographies have a way of echoing for a lifetime. “I’ve never left; this is part of me,” he reflected after the show. “I like Hamburg as an idea; something in the back of my mind.”You saw what that was, the essence of his inspiration, in a flash: Sailors in peaked caps on leave, girls in thigh-high boots and leather, the people who mill around docks and nightclubs. The clothes evoked ’60s beatniks, countercultural girls in sweaterdresses, smartly dressed officers in uniform, and naval ratings in sailor pants—looks that ran up and down the register of the cool, the hip, and the immaculately classic. It was an obvious, simple idea, really, but one marinated in a mind that has the sophistication to align the results with Coco Chanel’s heritage, and with what any girl would absolutely kill to wear right now.The point of difference between this collection and other brands’ preseason shows is that it’s intended to display the work produced by the Chanel-owned luxury artisan-specialist companies: Maison Michel (millinery), Barrie (Scottish cashmere), Goossens (jewelry), and Lesage (embroidery). The sailing concept couldn’t have been a better showcase for them. There were riffs on navy Guernsey knits, with sailor collars and thigh-grazing leg-warmer boots in the Scottish cashmere. A brilliant array of jeweled cabochon brooches, cap pins in the shape of stars, sparkling crystal bootie bows, and pearl shoulder straps was made by Goossens. And Lesage sequins shimmered like oil-slicked water.And then there was the stroke of genius that was the Maison Michel–made nautical tweed cap to consider at length. There was one on the head of every model, female and male, in the show. Look at it long enough—whether it had tulle net knotted over it or not—and the thing began triggering associations. Charlotte Rampling inThe Night Porter,perhaps? Beatle caps, definitely. In fact, they only got that name as a craze in the ’60s once John Lennon started wearing them after the Beatles had played gigs for months in clubs in the Reeperbahn red-light district in Hamburg.
They’d picked up the idea of the caps from the sailors. “I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg,” Lennon once said.
6 December 2017
The healing power of nature, the need for optimism, the importance of handcraft, the celebratory power of forward-looking fashion: All these things have been constant talking points in Paris for over a week now, but it took Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel to actually bring the vertiginous cliffs and coursing waterfalls of the Gorges du Verdon to the Grand Palais and wrap it all up in a final spectacular word on every point. The scenery—a facsimile of a beauty spot in the South of France—was so naturalistic that a breeze floated along the canyon, blowing off the girls’ clear plastic boaters and setting their extraordinary clothes flowing as they strode on in their thigh-high plastic boots. “Did you feel it?” asked Karl Lagerfeld (rhetorically) afterward. “The molecules from the water, when you breathe them in, it’s very healthy for you! It’s why you feel good in places like this.”He had no need to check. We felt it, all right. Whether it was endorphin effects of the big outdoors scenario or the clothes, this walk in the country produced a fashion high that was shot through with relevance. The spray and the sunlight sparkled on clear plastic coats and capes; the house tweeds fluttered with fringes or were reduced to almost transparent cages. Lurex threads and crystal jewelry glinted. The intricate balance between natural-looking textures and advanced technical skills was breathtakingly dynamic to behold.With eyes and ears open to the disco-era revival that has been playing across Paris, it was easy to infer a ’60s/’80s youth vibe going on here: See the space-age boots and the astronaut-girl capelets, and wasn't that the underlying beat of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love” on the soundtrack? Karl Lagerfeld was having none of it. “You are too young to remember the Sixties. They were never like this! The fabrics then were terrible. There’s not a fabric here which you can buy elsewhere. They’re all made by Chanel, in-house.”Touché. And yet. To think of plastic in fashion—and of talk of new generation—is inevitably to be reminded of what was going on in Paris in 1967, when Andre Courreges and Paco Rabanne pioneered the use of new materials at a time when it seemed the world was flying toward an optimistic future. Fifty years ago was also the beginning of the political youth uprisings that spread from the Summer of Love in San Francisco toLes événementsin Paris in 1968.
That time was all about a mass movement of liberal values which swept America and Europe.Karl Lagerfeld was around to witness all this postwar excitement as a young man who had left his home in Germany and won The International Woolmark Prize competition in 1957. He is now horrified at the rise of neo-nazism in the country of his birth—after the recent election, far-right candidates are now in the German Bundestag for the first time since Hitler rose to power. “Germany, when I was eighteen, was not so funny,” Lagerfeld understated. So was there a political shadow behind this optimistic collection too? If you will, yes. “I don't make explanations of what I design. I am not a philosopher who leaves notes on seats,” he said, waving away that kind of talk. “You watch; you can see what you want.” Meanwhile, mother nature played hand-in-hand with the Chanel mood beautifully. It may have only been a set, but at one point, as the sun came out, a real rainbow appeared in the waterfall, humanity's biblical symbol of hope for the future.
3 October 2017
It was a Chanel Haute Couture collection that was as finely engineered by Karl Lagerfeld and the skilledpetites mainsof the house’s legendary workrooms as the giant model of the Eiffel Tower that rose above the sand-and-gravel runway into a dry ice–misted sky in the highest reaches of the dome of the Grand Palais.“I’m feeling very out of it,” confided a jet-lagged Katy Perry. “I wasn’t sure if they’d chopped down the Eiffel Tower for Karl!”The city of Paris may not have gone that far, but after the show, the audience remained seated as Anne Hidalgo, the city’s dynamic mayor, did the next best thing and presented Karl with its highest honor, the Médaille Grand Vermeil de la Ville.“To say that I was impressed is too weak a word,” said Hidalgo in her stirring presentation. “Your imagination is boundless, and your ability to transport us into a different universe. You are a universal person,” she added, “but you are also someone who makes Paris more beautiful and more creative. You are a Parisian.”“I am a foreigner,” said Karl, pointedly, “and strangers see things through different eyes, with a detachment.Vive la France!” he added, “and above all,Vive Paris!”It was a touching moment, for in many ways, this “foreigner” has defined Parisian fashion from the birth of its dynamic ready-to-wear to the hautest of haute couture since he won a prize in the 1954 International Wool Secretariat, alongside an equally youthful Yves Saint Laurent. Karl subsequently went to apprentice with the theatrically-minded couture designer Pierre Balmain before becoming the couturier chez Jean Patou. From the early ’60s through the ’90s (as a current exhibit of Guy Bourdin’s images for Chloé in that brand’s newly opened Maison Chloé reveals), Karl made a profound impact on the city’s ready-to-wear identity in his work for that house.The front row buzz at the Chanel collection was generated by an Amazon army of glamorous performers, all sporting the new peroxide crop: Cara Delevingne, Tilda Swinton, Katy Perry, and Kristen Stewart. Notable too were the doting, Chanel-clad mothers with their young daughters dressed to match. Couture, as Karl was about to show them all, has no limits.Karl’s collection showcased the skills of the Chanel ateliers and the amazing craftspeople—the feather-makers, the embroiderers, the boot makers, the pleaters, et al.—whose work brings his pulsing imagination and expressionist sketches to life.
4 July 2017
Fashion’s constant oxygen is the ephemeral—something new, then something newer, and so on ad infinitum. Today’s Chanel Resort 2018 show broke that cycle to take a deep inhalation of pure antiquity. Fashions must fade, obsolescence is a given, but this was a tilt at the eternal: Chanel does Ancient Greece.The lucky audience was taken to an Elysian ideal of a Greek ruin. We sat beneath 11 crumbling columns that sheltered rosemary and sage growing between the cracked flagstones and a gnarled old olive tree set into a rocky outcrop. This was a site under turn-of-the-20th-century archaeological excavation, flanked by wooden scaffolding. A marble Venus beneath it had been partially stuffed into a burlap sack, as if half dispatched for transport to some British museum. The Aegean sparkled beneath us on a darkening horizon dappled with distant isles. So—again, lucky us—we were in Greece, right?Chanel’s bouclé-bound, No. 5–fragrant faithful have happily followed its Resort caravansary from Dubai to Seoul to Havana and beyond in recent years. We might easily have been seated within the Parthenon in Athens or the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion had Chanel been inclined to take us there. Yet this season Karl Lagerfeld brought the show back to Paris.Last October at a breakfast hosted by Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, for visiting editors to discuss how to support a city facing declining tourism numbers, it was suggested that it didn’t make much sense for Paris’s most famous fashion houses—the icons of Parisian allure—to hold these shows anywhere but here. Today Chanel duly delivered, just at a moment when the city seems slumped in a strange pre-election purgatory of niggling unease that a frighteningly extreme candidate might just come to power.There was also, naturally, a proper thematic Chanel-specific reason to be exactly here, in the Galerie Courbe of the Grand Palais, among a set inspired by those two famous Greek sites. The clue to it was that half-packed statue, a copy of Coco Chanel’s own 1st-century headless Venus that remains in her apartment on Rue Cambon. Chanel’s press notes also flagged Mademoiselle’s contribution as costume designer to Jean Cocteau’s 1922 reimagining of the ancient Greek tragedyAntigone(soon after recast as an anti-Fascist existentialist parable by Jean Anouilh). She was a confirmed wrestler with Greco-Roman culture—but how would the culture that produced Leonidas and Lysistrata permeate Lagerfeld?
3 May 2017
One thing you can trust in with Karl Lagerfeld is his preternatural ability to put his finger on topics du jour. To assemble in the Grand Palais and see a giant space rocket in front of us was to know he’d done it again. What was this—a Chanel show about to blast off on a mission to take No. 5 to one of the seven newly discovered Earth-like planets orbiting the Trappist-1 star? Even fashion’s astronomer in chief couldn’t possibly have anticipated NASA’s announcement on February 22 that there may be life-supporting planets out there. Still, his metaphor for the times was already on the right path: It is the most futuristic of fashion’s current escape plans. Doesn’t the idea of getting off Earth altogether suddenly feel like a rather cheery thought, considering the mess it’s in?Lagerfeld is never one for gloom and despondency, and he resolutely hates looking back. Logical, then, to go forward—to the Chanel universe and beyond! The starship Chanel crew will be wearing glittery lunar boots with co-respondent black tips, tweed tunics with standaway collars, Bermuda shorts, “insulated” silver leather suits, and metallic padded space stoles. When the craft navigates to the dark side of the moon (perhaps), eveningwear will consist of black-and-white chiffon “space person” prints and garments embroidered in constellations of Chanel pearls. Satellite bags will be carried.As a spectacle of the season (after a grueling month of shows), it made for an amusing performance—especially when, in a feat of pyrotechnics and hydraulics, the starship Chanel really did appear to lift off.
7 March 2017
“I wanted something impeccable, clean. I wanted the girls to look like walking fashion drawings,” saidKarl Lagerfeld, adding, “And I must say, I love feathers!” It sounds contradictory, but this was a calm and stripped-backChanelcouture show by Lagerfeldian standards. There was no immersive set, no overt theme, and an absence of jokey accessories or visual puns. Once one had taken in the fact that the mirrored circular runway reflected the famed Art Deco mirrors of Coco Chanel’s stairs at her atelier on the Rue Cambon, there was nothing to distract from the contemplation of the essence of haute Chanel-ness itself.At the beginning, Lagerfeld put a sustained emphasis on tailoring—a neglected art in womenswear these days. The Chanel suit, in myriad candy colors—mint, checkered pink, peach, lavender, yellow—got an emphatic shoulder and a wide, contrasting belt;un peu’80s, perhaps (that decade, after all, is being referenced everywhere). From then on, it was all about silver sparkle and silhouette—the segue being an elegant narrow, ankle-length beige checked coat, subtly flecked with glitter and finished with an iridescent sequined collar and cuffs.As the show progressed into evening, slim, elgonated lines alternated with pretty ballerina-length crinoline skirts—and the silver sparkle showcased the maximum capabilities of the Lesage embroiderers. Here came Lagerfeld’s feather obsession; poufs of peach ostrich and marabou trimmed the hems and sleeves of glittering columns—indeed, with the spontaneous air of doodles dashed off his sketch pad. Couture is at its best, always, when it wears the fruits of its labors lightly. When a dove gray chiffon crinoline with individual white feathers wispily hand-sewn to it by the thousand passed by, it somehow managed to outshine all its sparkling sisters.
24 January 2017
“The Ritz is very gilded,” saidKarl Lagerfeld, gesturing toward the decor of the newly refurbished Paris hotel as he held court on a plush velvet couch in the lobby. “Look, white with gold!” Sparkle, sequins, gold metallics, even gold-dipped feathers naturally became a festive-looking thread in the Métiers d’Art collection,Chanel’s sixth and final runway show of 2016. Well, how on earth does Karl Lagerfeld’s mind keep pouring out ideas at this rate for Chanel, let alone all the work he does for Fendi? “I see things in my sleep. I have a pad by my bed and wake up and sketch them. If I don’t, I cannot go back to sleep.”This time, at least, his waking—or dreaming—imagination hadn’t had to travel far. Coco Chanel famously lived at the Ritz from 1937 throughout World War II, and died here in 1971. The house of Chanel is steps away from the hotel’s back door, on the Rue Cambon. Lagerfeld’s angle, though, wasn’t the life of Chanel herself, but, he emphasized, “cosmopolitan elegance [and] people from all over the world who’ve come to the Ritz. There were hundreds of dinners in the ’20s and ’30s, where women wore incredible things. But you cannot tell from the collection what decade it is, and I think that is modern, no?”The show, which was served up in three sittings at lunch, tea, and dinnertime, sent a mixed bunch of lanky models, “daughters-of,” and Pharrell Williams winding their way around tables in the hotel lobby and a specially built “Jardin d’Hiver.” It made sense as a ready-made scene without any need for flown-in props. The Ritz is exactly where the international high-rolling couture customers billet themselves while shopping in Paris. Likely, too, considering their parentage, more than a few of the models have been familiar with this kind of lobby life since they were babies: Lily-Rose Depp, Georgia May Jagger, Levi Dylan, Sistine Stallone, and Willow Smith among them.Hair up in net veils decorated with roses, the girls pranced at a clip in midi skirts and Lurex pedal pushers, bubble-shaped capes, and square-shouldered jackets. There were skinny knit silvery dresses, a gorgeous white lace poet-sleeved blouse with a black leather cape and pants, a navy sheared mink tailored coat piped in gold leather, and tiered skirts flouncing out from narrow dropped-waist bodices. It was less a look than a cocktail menu of individual styles, really. But as Lagerfeld put it, that is the measure of the distance between Coco Chanel’s time and ours.
“In those days, even to the ’60s, there were one or two designers who dictated what everyone wore. That is not the case today, when there are thousands of images of fashion available, so anyone can choose to wear what suits her.” Just as long as they belong to the Chanel glitterati, in this case.
6 December 2016
“This is technology. But with the lingerie, it’s intimate technology!”Karl Lagerfeld'sdescription ofChanel’sspring show was typical of him—a mad linguistic paradox. What does lace-trimmed silk underwear have to do with a runway set constructed as a giant mainframe computer? Watching the show, the mind rushed to and fro trying to solve that problem. Was Lagerfeld thinking about how large corporations gather consumer behavior statistics in order to develop products? Could this be an imagined Chanel “mothermind” hidden somewhere the behind the Rue Cambon, processing global data on the attractiveness of camellias, quilted leather, tweed, and No5? Maybe the two alien-suit-clad Chanel-bots who opened the show were actually running it?And what of the “intimate technology”? Was it a reference to the significant bond between the everywoman and her smartphone screen? The constant swiping we all do, in the privacy of whatever state of dress or undress we’re in, at all times of the day and night? Brain freeze soon sets in when tackling such Lagerfeldian conundrums. It was far better to relax and look at the mega-data streaming along the runway.Today’s fashion isn’t linear anymore. That much is for sure. We’re in an era when everything can happen, all at the same time. And that’s how it was here—in a big way. It included everything from tweeds twinkling with crystal and plastic and vibrant silk prints to pretty frothy chiffon sundresses, medallion necklaces, and a whole palette of summery colors. And among it all was a funny 3D Chanel robot bag, the souvenir of the season.
4 October 2016
“Behind the girls in the show, there are 200 more who make what they wear—that’s quite a lot, no?—and I thought we should show them to the public too.”Karl Lagerfeldwas standing in the midst of possibly the cleverest setup he’s yet devised as a backdrop for a Chanel couture collection. He’d shipped the entire staff of the ateliers, which are housed on Rue Cambon—along with their dummies, sewing machines, cutting tables, fabrics, embroidery materials, canvas toiles, every specialist tool of the trade—to the Grand Palais, and asked them to carry on working as usual in their transplanted environment. In the old days, Coco Chanel invited her audience to shows in her house, but this time the house came to the audience. Scrutinizing what was going on from the vantage point of the front row, Will Smith and Jessica Chastain were at first speculating over whether thepetites mainswere members of their own profession—actors. But no: This was no art installation, Broadway set, or movie production, but the actual behind-the-scenes people who physically made the clothes that were walking on the models.You don’t get a complete sense of Chanel’s “reality” show from the front-on pictures in this gallery, but the audience was facing sideways-on, viewing the models, with their piled-up curly hair, their cropped tweed wide-leg pantsuits, and their extraordinarily wide, yet flatly squared-off shoulders in profile. To watch them striding past the atelier craftspeople as they carried on sewing and embroidering turned out to be the best angle on the collection, as it was all down to the silhouette of those shoulders, the cool proportions of the kitten-heeled, ankle-hugging black suede boots under the cropped wide pants, and the low-swooping belled skirt shapes of the duchesse satin dresses that came later.Close up, naked-eye viewing of such feats as Chanel’s floriform embroidery, overlapping paillettes, and embedded strands of emerald and ruby stones can’t be rivaled by what digital technology is capable of recording. Couture is a 3-D experience because the development of these clothes is done in the round, draped on a mannequin, and ultimately developed to fit the specific human body of the person who buys them.
After the show, it transpired that the atelier desks, and the walls behind them were full of all the work-in-progress stages of the garments in the show; Karl Lagerfeld’s sketches, canvas toiles recording the internal structures of dresses and jackets, charts of fabric samples, the paper printouts of jewelry that are moved around on patterns while the embroidery-placement decisions are being made.As a demonstration—proof, really—of the actual value of haute couture, it couldn’t have been clearer or more awe-inspiring. Grand gestures, travel to exotic locations, surreal wit, and topical sociological commentary are all very well as settings for fashion shows, but on this occasion the in-house reality was just as astonishing.
5 July 2016
The American fashion press who flew into Cuba for theChanelResort show landed two hours before the first U.S. cruise ship to have docked in Havana in nearly 40 years. The passengers of theAdoniahad no idea what to expect when they set foot on the dock; in the event, they were surrounded by crowds of Havana residents, high-fiving greetings. The historic thawing of relations between the Castro regime and the United States is palpable this week in Cuba, a warmth that was stoked to fever level last night.Seven hundred guests of Chanel were taken to the open-air street show in a multicolored convoy of the city’s open-top Buicks, Cadillacs, and Oldsmobiles. The owners tooted their horns through the streets of Old Havana, while people came out to line the streets, crowd dilapidated balconies and rooftops, wave and laugh. It could easily have gone the other way—who knew there could be such a welcome in a poor, communist country for a super-luxurious brand and the wealthy women who wear its finery? But it was the people of Cuba who set the atmosphere running—a sense of exuberant excitement that involved everyone from the models to the normally impassively unimpressible members of the press.It was Chanel that started the new lark of traveling Resort shows—immersive summertime trips to evermore far-flung locations—andDior,Louis Vuitton, andGuccihave been joining in. Occasionally, it has to be said that descriptions of spectacular locations can overshadow collections that aren’t so worth writing home about. But with this show,Karl Lagerfeldachieved it all: a spectacular locale at a historic turning point in international relations, and a collection that was relatable, wearable, exquisitely made, and joyfully youthful.Trust Karl to find the symbol of French-Cuban entente cordiale in a piece of clothing. That would be the beret in this case—ultra-French in origin, but also inescapably Che Guevara. There were sparkly black versions scattered throughout, as well as panamas with Chanel camellias tucked into the hatbands. Even better, as a diplomatic coup: the living embodiment of French-Cuban talent represented by Ibeyi, the twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz, who performed at the beginning of the show, hot on the heels of their appearance inBeyoncé’sLemonade.
4 May 2016
What couldKarl Lagerfeldpossibly do next to top theChanelairport, the casino, the supermarket, the art fair, the Zen garden, the Roman movie set—or that mind-boggling time he had a chunk of iceberg trucked to the Grand Palais? Put in some white carpet and put out the little gold chairs, it transpired. Perhaps Lagerfeld is tired of everyone psychoanalyzing his sets—or maybe it’s yet another of his comments on the state of play in the world. So here we were, everyone in her own front row seat, watching models file by in the Fall 2016 Chanel NON-set set.This, of course, is the way collections were shown to clients in couture houses way before catwalks were invented—so in a sense, this was both a down-to-earth presentation fit for the “real” mood that’s sweeping through Paris fashion right now as well as a reminder of Chanel’s heritage.You couldn’t call it no-frills, though—because therewerefrills, chiefly falling in a froth of tiers on a short white lace trapeze dress with a camellia and a black ribbon tied in a bow at the neck. In other words, classic Chanel at its most delightful, and yet also speaking to a trend of the moment. It came somewhere toward the end of the collection, which Lagerfeld refused to explain—over-intellectualization of fashion is his bête noire. What appeared to be a vaguely equestrian theme gave form to leather-brimmed boaters with a dangling strap at one side, riding boots, and, later, khaki mackintoshes. The tweed suits passed by intercut with denim at one point (maybe a nod to an ’80s collection?), and soon after they were prettily doused in shades of pink. Along the way, there were diamanté Chanel emoji charms thrown in. Still, the main lesson learned? The return of the power of the Chanel pearl necklace, worn in piles. The more the merrier—quite literally.
8 March 2016
“Fashion is part of the events of our times,” declaredKarl Lagerfeldabout the Zen-like, eco-conscious serenity of theChanelHaute Couture collection in the Grand Palais. Reacting to the times (especially in an age as troubled as ours) can also mean needing to detach from them, fashion-mindfulness equated with luxury in this case. So where last October there was the high-tech, noisy hurly-burly of theChanel Airport, now there were the lush green lawns of a minimalist garden, water lily ponds, a slatted wood pavilion, and plenty of space and calm to contemplate it all under simulated blue skies. It seemed incredible that the same venue had been transformed into a convincing casino for the last couture show—a tribute to the set-design genius at Chanel—and just as incredible that this time, the gambling chips had been replaced by . . . wood chips.You read correctly: Wood chips were used as beading, paillettes, and 3-D frills among techniques involving recycled paper and organic woven yarn. The wedding look—a dreamy tufted hoodie, dress, and train—was all “made from wild cotton,” said Lagerfeld, quipping, “This is high-fashion ecology. It must not look like some sloppy demonstration!”A case could be built for haute couture being the most non-environmentally impactful branch of clothing production, anyway. It’s handmade, takes infinite hours of work, and potentially lasts a lifetime, the antithesis of fast fashion’s notorious processes and disposability. As the show unfolded, it became, in a way, a meditation on the timeless validity of Chanel’s principles: pale bouclé suits, attenuated in the skirt, puffed in the sleeve, and with set-away collars; a movement of classic navy and white (there was a lovely white-collared classic French Gigi-at-school dress); and passages of languid pearly charmeuse and black cocktailwear.But it was the evening that soared from the moment Lagerfeld started to introduce flecks of gold into the suiting. An incredible jacket and skirt made completely of gold and black geometric paillettes, a narrow streak of wonderment worn by Jamie Bochert, passed by, succeeded by airy lamé capes, a haze of gold and sparkle, floating from the shoulders of white pantsuits. It would take a much closer look to understand the technical wizardry and the actual degree of ecological soundness embedded in these clothes. That’s what clients will come to understand when they go up to the Rue Cambon for their fittings.
It may be that they won’t be swayed one way or the other by the trouble Chanel took to source some of its materials this season.What surely matters at a time like this, even to the superrich, is whether these clothes have the built-in sustainability of another sort: Will they look just as beautiful and valid five or 10 years from now? Answer: Chosen well, yes. In another season, Karl and Chanel will doubtless have moved swiftly on from talking about ecology. Still, one thing’s absolutely for certain: While the Grand Palais turf goes to compost and the temporary pavilion wood is repurposed, the precious clothes on this runway will never be destined to end their lives in a landfill.
26 January 2016
There’s always so much going on at aChanelshow that it’s ever more difficult to keep your head together enough to know what to describe first. In the case of the latest Chanel Métiers d’Art extravaganza, which just played out in Rome, perhaps one should start withKarl Lagerfeld’s relationship with the city, which dates as far back as 1963 and his debut season designing for Tiziani. Or maybe we should begin with the little-known fact thatCoco Chaneldesigned for the incredible, classy ’50s actresses Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée, Monica Vitti, and Romy Schneider, all of whom starred in Italian movies by Visconti and Pasolini wearing her clothes. These threads, elusively woven together like the silvery strands glinting in the tweeds and embroideries today, were the connecting idea behind the whole collection. But then the whole thing was built up, as only Chanel can manage, into a mega-faceted Sensurround event about movies and moviemaking and sets and Paris and Rome, all of it constructed for one night in Cinecittà, Italy’s “Hollywood on the Tiber.”But really, despite all these excitements—a whole black-and-white reconstruction of Paris! A chance to roam the torch-lit avenues and temples where the TV seriesRomewas shot! An open-air premiere of a film by Lagerfeld!—we should be speaking plainly about the clothes. They were some of the best—cool and sexy, with a bit of the pleasingly sleazy in places—that Lagerfeld has done in a long time. It is in Lagerfeld’s nature to bat away too much talk of themes: Every time he builds an edifice, he’ll only ever shrug off its importance in interviews. This collection might have been the result of putting Italian Neorealismo and French film noir into the cocktail shaker, but he insisted that what came out “never looked like this in the past! It is just an idea, a dream, of Paris. We need to keep dreaming, because the reality in Paris is bleak. And that is not funny.”With their long hair teased into messy demi-beehives by Sam McKnight, the girls slouched one by one out of a fake Paris Metro station, some of them wearing long jackets shrugged over long, lace-covered legs, others in black ciré pencil skirts and patent raincoats, one in a quilted leather suit. It’s a Parisian art to suggest eroticism rather than blatantly strut it, but close up, the kink was definitely there in the metal rings planted center-front on belts and on a choker or two. (After all, thiswasa show taking place on Federico Fellini’s movie stage, Teatro 5.
) As the show went along, so the embellishments came in, since the Métiers d’Art collection is the showcase for the intricate handwork of Chanel’s specialist craft suppliers. There were metallic embroideries and pleating on caped shapes, delicate faggoting techniques on slip dresses, and, at one point, an ovoid, coral pink–petaled dress that seemed to nod in the direction of the couturiers of Rome—Capucci, perhaps. Considering that all the people who put their expert hands to this collection must have finished it in the terrible aftermath of the attacks on Paris, its quality as well as its beauty reads as testament to what the French are so good at.
1 December 2015
SeeChaneland fly? As much as the foreign members of the audience might wish, that’s not quite the case, since there are still 24 Paris hours to go till the Spring shows are over. Still, women of all nations were amused to check in ahead of time at the Chanel airport terminalKarl Lagerfeldinstalled in the Grand Palais. It provided a funny enhanced-reality replica of a situation we all know only too well: the one where we watch everyone else milling around, busy on their ways with their rolling suitcases, their tracksuits, and contra-freeze in-flight comfort sweaters, their practical flats for walking the endless corridors to baggage claim, and the crucial sunglasses for the jet-lagged arrival. Only, of course, all this is considerably upgraded: “It’s the idea of how itshouldlook!” quipped Lagerfeld.It is strange to see Chanel taking over the flight controls the day after a dispute between Air France and its workers came to an ugly head over falling business and layoffs. Instead, here was Chanel putting the best and most globally appreciated face of France forward, and laying out an array of products that will most certainly fly off the racks at duty-free and in all cities where the house has boutiques. Chanel has been most careful to clock up its air miles in customer-care outreach in the past couple of years: The destinations indicated on the Grand Palais departure board—Singapore, Dubai, Seoul, Tokyo—are all cities where Lagerfeld and co. have taken the double-C traveling show to first-class customers.And what will this well-traveled international clientele be taking onboard from this particular show? Bits and pieces from all over the concourse, no doubt—a Chanel range that runs from the witty and kitsch (Chanel hard-case wheelie carry-on bags, Teva-type sandals with tweed straps and flashing runway-landing lights running around the soles), takes off in the ironic, insider trophy (’70s leisure jackets, plane-patterned tricolor intarsia cashmere sweaters, and a flash of Laura Ashley–esque puff-sleeved denim), and then lands amid sparkling splendor. The twinkling herringbone jackets and shell tops, paved in crystal and decorated with fat, black ribbon bows, are quintessentially, timelessly Chanel, nothing to do with novelty—yet also, in their way, an accessory rather than an outfit. In the congested skies of fashion, Captain Karl is one person who knows how to navigate Chanel in all the right directions.
6 October 2015
The casino was deserted, the roulette tables empty. The space vibrated with a spooky subsonic intensity. Kristen Stewart emerged tentatively, crossed to a table, took a seat. She was quickly followed by a platoon of Karl's muses: Geraldine Chaplin, Rinko Kikuchi, Rita Ora, Lara Stone, Vanessa Paradis, Stella Tennant, and, finally, Julianne Moore, each of them wearing an outfit Lagerfeld had specially designed to reflect the way he saw them, for them and them alone. Then, while the chosen few gambled, the cookie-cutter models circled, production-line androids in seamless clothes that had been printed—some of them at least—by a computer the Chanel-ers call Sweetie. Lagerfeld was tickled pink at the thought of the most iconic jacket of the 20th century recreated for the 21st, using techniques that would have blown Chanel's mind. At the same time, there was the peculiar Terminator-like subtext, machines replacing man, even in the art of design. "But I sketch everything," Lagerfeld insisted. "The computer follows my sketches."Even so, it was an extraordinarily ominous scenario. "I didn't feel that at all," Stewart demurred backstage. "I just wanted to find a seat where I felt lucky, where I could win big." But, with a lot of assistance from Michel Gaubert's portentous soundtrack, the collection had a distinctly adult, primarily dark, edging on decadent mood. In this context, even Barry White's uplifting "Love's Theme" that played out the finale took on a distinctly ironic flavor. The clones were uniformly heavy-browed, rouge-cheeked, and bewigged, like women Ex Machina (the fashion industry may have found a film to replace its deep-rooted affection for Gattaca). Combined with the wide-shouldered, box-shaped jackets, the look alluded to Joan Crawford, in keeping with the inspiration from the 1930s illustrations of Chanel's lover Paul Iribe that had come full-blown to Karl in a dream. He said that was about exploring a new way to emphasize the shoulders without pads, instead accentuating the line with epaulettes. It loaned a militant edge, which scarcely mitigated the sense of discomfort the collection provoked.And yet, there was also an eerie beauty in the clothes. Knowing that computer-manipulated lasers had shaped the quilted fabric of the first looks added an X (Machina) factor. Later, there were swooping hems out of time, and those strange Chanel couture textures that hinted at handwork not of this world.
Nadja Bender wore a funnel coat covered with crushed pink camellias that felt like a vision of Paris immediately before Chanel herself arrived on the scene to change fashion forever. The sense of epochs elided was overpowering.The gambling metaphor was appropriate for a moment when the world's money markets are a cynical casino. But Lagerfeld was typically pointed when he broke down the metaphor's relevance to his own role in fashion. "I gamble with collections more than ever," he admitted. "I'm always telling myself: 'You can do better. You're lazy. You can make an effort.'" Reflection has been his default position lately. "I never get any satisfaction from what I'm doing," he added. "I do it for the doing, not the having done." But he couldn't resist dismissing his latest exercise in intellectual showmanship as a promotional vehicle for Chanel's fine jewelry. His vedettes wore diamond stars and comets and bows on their customized creations. "It was a dream," Chaplin rhapsodized. The 70-year-old said she mostly plays "grannies in horror movies" now. Lagerfeld allowed her to be a glamorous granny today.
7 July 2015
There were so many reasons why the Chanel Cruise collection that Karl Lagerfeld showed in Seoul tonight made perfect sense. From a design point of view, Korean traditions offered him a trove of inspiration much newer than the familiar tropes of China and Japan. From a cultural point of view, the K-Pop phenomenon had all the color and sugar-rush kick that Lagerfeld could possibly crave. And then there was the inescapable business perspective: Judging by the strikingly stylish audience, the local clientele might be just about the best advertisement Chanel could possibly want. Coco herself never made it this far east, but she would surely have been as impressed as Lagerfeld was to see at least 12 guests in the same dress Gisele Bündchen wore in the Spring 2015 show while he was doing his finale circuit. Incidentally, Mrs. Brady was in the front row. So were Kristen Stewart, Tilda Swinton, and Isabelle Huppert. The modern Chanel is a broad church.And it travels. Several hundred journalists from all over the world assembled in Seoul, so pie-eyed with jet lag that they couldn't help but wonder how Karl himself managed to seem so entirely on top of it all. His solution for circadian dysrhythmia was simple: fly private. "I ask for everything because I want nothing," was his irrefutable rationale.Quotable Karl was in full effect in Seoul. "I have no idea of any kind of practical life," he insisted at one point, declaring that the extent of his household activity was opening the fridge door. And yet there is always a practical something in Lagerfeld's collections for Chanel. Here, there was a sprinkling of sober little jackets, half-belted high in the back. A drop-waisted pleated dress was proper smart. A gorgeous tweed ensemble wove the Korean characters for "Chanel," "camellia," and "Cambon" into an elusive pattern.It was, in fact, this integration of the host nation into the collection that created its most special effects. Past and future knocked boots (they were actually leather stockings). The models were made up like manga kewpies, their hair concealed under big "hats" of braided black hair, a reference to Korean tonsorial tradition. The major visual motif was a busy and brightly colored patchwork, a technique, which, Lagerfeld said, is only found in Korea. The mother-of-pearl embroidery that traced a black wrap dress was inspired by the decoration on Korean wedding chests.
The high empire line and flaring sleeves on full-silhouetted dresses were Lagerfeld's sublimation of traditional garb.But then there were the oddities, synthetic, like people imagine K-Pop culture to be: wide patent pants, turquoise lace culottes, more lace with a sheen that looked like it had been washed in petrol. Lagerfeld trimmed tweed with patent, and attached a cream patent collar to a black gown. Jarring, unexpected flourishes. One outfit had a tabard of abstracted camellias. "Mechanical," Lagerfeld called them. They found their match in the perkily hiccupping electro of Michel Gaubert's soundtrack.The designer was sporting an Apple Watch with a gold link band, apparently one of an edition limited to just three (Anna Wintour and Beyoncé have the others). Aside from the inevitable photo gallery of superstar feline Choupette, he was quite happy to summon up the app, which showed his beating heart. "Just to prove I have one," he clarified. But who really needed proof after tonight's energetic and engaging presentation? Lagerfeld not only has heart, he has Seoul too.
4 May 2015
It wasn't exactly aloveletter—Karl Lagerfeld is much too savvy for sentiment—but the Chanel collection he showed today was, he conceded, "a vision of France from a stranger who thinks France is not that bad." He's grown increasingly tired of the drip-drip-drip of cynical negativity, much of it from the French themselves. So you could almost construe Lagerfeld's last three ready-to-wear collections for Chanel as an uncynical celebration of French banality: thesupermarché, themanifestation(does a single day pass without a demonstration?), and now, thebrasserie. The Brasserie Gabrielle, to be exact. The Grand Palais, the grandest exhibition space inle toutParis, was turned into the kind of all-day, leather-banquette-ed winer-and-diner you can find on almost any street corner in Paris. Caveat: The space was simply too vast to communicate the errant charm of a real brasserie, even those as big as La Coupole, Balzar, and Bofinger, all places that Lagerfeld used to frequent when brasseries were crucibles of culture. (That was long before it became impossible for him to eat out, because of a selfie-crazed public that wouldn't wait till he'd swallowed his food before they invaded his space.) So this was actually one occasion when the usual, fabulously grandiose concept for a Chanel show stumbled.But the original idea came from a place of love, so the stumble was easily overlooked. Especially because the collection itself was the strongest RTW showing from Chanel in a while. It had a sturdy base. The whole show was staged on a single style of shoe, a toe-capped, mid-heeled slingback—ringardin local parlance, because it is so bourgeois, but Lagerfeld loved the poise, the confidence, the ease of walking it gave his models. And that degree of comfort with bourgeois dress codes stabilized a collection that spiraled in a dozen directions. There were at least 97 looks—that's a huge playground—but there was enough tweed to restore Chanel to its core.Imagine the press of humanity in a crowded Parisian brasserie, circa the era when Lagerfeld would have been patronizing such joints. There was that kind of diversity here. A look as straightforward as a tweed coat over a houndstooth skirt nailed an everyday fashion need. There were also solid blanket checks, named "the Donald" after the earnest Scotsman who wove them. Such folksy detail doesn't really seem like a Lagerfeld thing, but that's because the world doesn't know everything about him.
Although one thing it knows is his curiosity about the future…aGattaca-styled projection, not freakazoid cybernetic but a subtle shift on the now. And that was delivered in this collection with an effect that looked like polyhedron scales. They will be the head-scratcher in this collection. What they actually were was a multitude of bows, a strange testament to Lagerfeld's pursuit of an idea regardless of whether it is conventionally aesthetically pleasing or not.The brasserie scenario subtly leaked into appealing details, like a handbag that looked like piles of ceramic plates, a scarf-hemmed skirt on Jamie Bochert that looked like piles of fine linen napkins…. That's how Lagerfeld textures his inspirations. And it's going to be a revelation to see how the French media responds to them.
10 March 2015
It took six months to make the 300 flowers that decorated the Chanel set today. Each of them had its own engine, and when at the show's start Baptiste Giabiconi applied a theatrical splash from a CC-branded watering can and they simultaneously burst into mechanical bloom, it felt like Spring 2515 in a world where the only life left was this small synthetic paradise. "Or maybe it's a world that never existed in the first place," Karl Lagerfeld mused afterward.He claimed the show came to him in an electronic flash. "One morning in bed, I saw it in a second." Which certainly beats most people's dyspeptic awakenings. But that is Lagerfeld to a fabulous T. He sees other worlds—and then he makes them. In the case of his new couture show, it was a garden, the kind of garden, perhaps, that the mad inventor Rotwang might have created inMetropolis, one of Lagerfeld's favorite films. There were also echoes ofBlade Runnerin the sense of a perfectly realized replicant world (and in the makeup, for that matter). Was Lagerfeld perhaps somewhat of a mad scientist, too? "No, I'm a well-trained machine," he fired back. "I know my métier." And that was on effortless display today.What Lagerfeld is really doing each season is fine-tuning an attitude. The clothes and accessories exist to amplify that attitude: the flat sock-booties, the bared midriffs, the slouchy skirts ending just below the knee, the huge Edwardian hats or the puffy beanies…they were today's ingredients in the ongoing saga of Chanel's constant reinvention. Lagerfeld is a psychic sponge, absorbing the energy and inclinations of the women he draws to him. If it was once Inès and Linda and Claudia who played the muse, it's now Cara and Kendall and their ilk, and the collections accordingly shift in sensibility. But it's Lagerfeld's unique genius to gauge how to combine reflections of them with projections of himself. That idiosyncratic combination of style and substance is what gives Chanel its potency.Still, there are always haters who squawk about the nothingness of each new collection in relation to "capital C" couture. Coco only knows what calcified notions they clasp to their withered bosoms, but Karl could certainly tell them about the bride's train that took 15 girls a month to make, if expenditure of man hours is a criterion the stick-in-the-muds value.
Then there will be everyone else who sees the color, the verve, the insinuation of a gloriously untrammeled imagination into the real (or real-ish) world.To elaborate on the notion of some future where all history—and even nature itself—has become a distant memory, Lagerfeld gave us flashes of the past as seen by the future: tweeds wantonly decaying into lavish fringing, ravishingly artificial floral trims, suits whose propriety was unhinged by proportion. You could imagine that this would stand for beauty in a world where people were wondering where all the flowers had gone. And not for nothing was it possible to track echoes of the collection Raf Simons showed for Dior yesterday. Both men are bent on the same course. It'll be thanks to designers like them that couture will still prevail even when we're all living under a dome in a galaxy far, far away. Lagerfeld nailed it backstage: "Keep the best, forget the rest."
27 January 2015
Karl Lagerfeld is always so onto-the-next-thing pragmatic about his work that it's hard to detect when—or if—he is ever really touched by what he does. But his latest Métiers d'Art show in celebration of the thrilling craftsmanship of Chanel's artisans moved him. After this morning's performance (there will be another this afternoon and one more this evening), he relaxed on the balcony of the Schloss Leopoldskron—breath frosting in the freezing air, lake behind him a glass mirror on which 20 swans had recently passed in close formation—like a man who was completely at peace with his past, present, and future. Usually there's a clipped urgency to Lagerfeld, but here he was happy to sit back and acknowledge how close the collection was to his heart. When Hudson Kroenig stepped out in his little-boy lederhosen, it could have been Karl an age ago. He mentioned that he was always partial to the Tyrol, and here it was: the feathered hats and breeches, the embroideries, the trims and braiding, given a sparkling fairy-tale spin.Salzburg was already an appropriately fairy-tale backdrop—jewel of Baroque architecture, birthplace of Mozart, setting forThe Sound of Music(Liesl and Rolf duetted on "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" in the Schloss' gazebo)—but Lagerfeld spun his own Mitteleuropa fantasy as his models with their gilded eyelids moved through rococo salons lit by candles. The capelets, frogged jackets, and side-striped trousers echoed a Viennese military academy. It was one of those jackets, transmuted into the uniform of a hotel page in Salzburg's Mittersill Hotel, that inspired Chanel's signature little black jacket (though it was more often white, Lagerfeld pointed out). There were plenty ofthemin the show, too. And where would Mitteleuropa be without loden green?InReincarnation, the film he screened last night, Pharrell Williams and Cara Delevingne brought Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth of Austria back to life. "Sissi" she was called, "CC" Pharrell sang. The lace and ribbons and elaborate sleeve details of Winterhalter's portraits of Sissi became part of the Chanel vocabulary in this collection, but they were balanced by a black leather biker worn with jeans, or tiny suede shorts paired with laced-up suede thigh-highs. (You could sense the Lonely Goatherd's flock getting nervous.) Sissi and CC, then and now, the kind of juggling act that has become a staple in Lagerfeld's massive collections for Chanel. (This one had 80-plus looks.
) Similarly, there was a striking dialogue between light and shade, the mark, you could say, of the filmmaker that Lagerfeld is proving himself to be. Jamie Bochert, elegantly neurotic in a black evening dress with a matching cape-jacket, might have newly sprung from Freud's couch (to continue in themitteleuropaischevein), while Lindsey Wixson was a fairy princess in gorgeously embroidered pale blue chiffon.There was another interesting historical confluence involving Chanel herself that underscored the rightness of this whole event for Lagerfeld. Romy Schneider, the quintessence of Austrian elegance, made her name playing Sissi in a 1950s trilogy. In 1961, director Luchino Visconti asked Chanel to dress Schneider forBoccaccio '70. She would return to the role of Sissi in 1972 for Visconti'sLudwig. Sissi, CC, Romy…It was pleasantly diverting to imagine just how much Lagerfeld was reincarnating with his show today.
2 December 2014
Today's set was Boulevard Chanel, a street scene immaculately re-created down to the last puddle on the asphalt and pane of glass in the apartment buildings, but when Karl Lagerfeld's models took to that street in protest, toting feminist placards and chanting slogans, there were some in the audience who blanched at what they saw as political passion co-opted by fashion artifice, especially in light of the current events in Hong Kong. Lagerfeld said he conceived the show within 24 hours of his last epic, so today's headlines weren't as relevant to his concept as themanifestations—or demonstrations—that bring bits of Paris to a standstill on an almost daily basis. Taking it to the streets is a time-honored French tradition. "I thought it was fun to make a demonstration about a subject I can very well adapt to," he said. "My mother was a feminist, and I was brought up with a history of that."Lagerfeld is fiendishly adept at such almost-throwaway statements, but the political subtext to his Chanel show today wasn't a mirage. Women's hard-won rights are newly threatened all over the world, from a Republican politician refusing to ratify the Violence Against Women Act in the U.S. to hard-line Islamists in the Middle East. "I don't see why every human being is not on the same level," said Lagerfeld, "especially in my business." He was also thinking about the turbulent events of May 1968, when Paris took to the streets in one of the definitive popular protests of recent history. "There was an air of freedom I never felt before in Paris," he recalled. "There was one line I loved: 'It's not allowed to tell people that things are not allowed.' Today, everything is forbidden. Political correctness killed everything."Of course, absolutely none of that means shit to a tree if Lagerfeld didn't deliver a collection of equal substance. Bearing in mind that he is inclined to show at least twice as many outfits as any other designer on the calendar, the broad gamut of today's collection offered so much that the cumulative impact was energy tempered by fierce intelligence. Release and restraint, in other words. So there were exuberant psychedelic splotches of watercolor shading everything from coat linings to boots, but there were also pristine white lace yokes that recalled Lagerfeld's days as creative director at Chloé, whose founder, Gaby Aghion, died this week. "I normally never dig in my past, but suddenly I had a vision," he said.
There was va-voom sweater dressing (and who else are you going to put in a va-voom sweater dress than Gisele Bündchen?), but there was also sober navy tailoring, with seams outlined in white. Lacquered pinstripes, Art Deco organzas, chain mail…don't even bother looking for a narrative thread; the fact is, as Lagerfeld said, "They're all pieces everyone can play with. No '60s, no '70s, no whatever, moremode de viethanmode."And, in that, they embody a fashion vision where everything is permitted. Coming from a fashion house as august as Chanel, that's pretty radical. Almost worth taking to the streets for.
30 September 2014
A huge terrace with a fireplace—it has always been in Karl Lagerfeld's mind as a beautiful idea, ever since he saw photos of the visionary architect Le Corbusier's long-gone Paris apartment. "I just never found a place to do it," he said after the Chanel show today. Until now, of course, when the gigantic forest-planting, iceberg-importing, supermarket-building extravaganzas of Chanel shows past were scaled down to mimic the stark geometry of Corbu's designs. At either end of the catwalk were huge fireplaces stoked with digital flames. Above the mantel, a big old baroque mirror. Brutalist and baroque: A typically provocative union from a designer who skates across time like fashion's answer to Doctor Who.But it wasn't simply with the setting that Lagerfeld indulged his long-cherished dream. Le Corbusier was the architect who made concrete a staple of modern design. So Lagerfeld made concrete the foundation of his collection. Concrete! In Haute Couture! When you turn it into tiny tiles, it becomes a beautiful mosaic. Who knew? Lagerfeld delightedly demonstrated the material's unexpected lightness by dangling a string of concrete beads under the noses of journalists. "Tongue in chic," he crowed. "Verychic."That twistedness was the key to the collection. The wordcoutureimplies cutting and seaming. There was none of that here. Everything was molded rather than seamed. "It's Haute Couture without the Couture," said Lagerfeld, tongue firmly incheek.And yet there was look after look of a gorgeousness so exquisite it could only be achieved in ateliers that were accustomed to confronting the impossible—and mastering it. It must help that Lagerfeld always has the future in mind as he cherry-picks his way through the past. Take lace and coat it with silicone. Think pink, but think plastic, too. Tatter, shred, disrespect…and make something new. That was all in keeping with the much-toutedyouth-ifying of Couture. Sam McKnight's hair and Maison Michel's little hats perched pertly on the back of the models' heads had the effect of a Haircut 100 cover fromThe Facecirca 1982. The effect was compounded by Lagerfeld building his silhouette on shorts. There were coatdresses over shorts, jackets and skirts over shorts, plus the perfect shoes for shorts—sandals. Given the molded,sculptednature of the clothes, Lagerfeld liked the ease of a flat. "The models can walk in those dresses like they're nothing," he said.
The show closed with a passage of long, chalk-white, almost penitent gowns, lavished with embroidery. The combination not only embodied the brutalist/baroque twinning of Lagerfeld's inspiration, it also echoed the duality of Coco Chanel's own life, the austerity of her professional self countered by the exotic orientalism of Coco at home. It made for a stunning contrast, matched only by the final foxtrot of Karl and his seven-months-pregnant bride, the Kiwi model Ashleigh Good. "I like pregnant women," he said, in keeping with his new cat-loving, godfather-ing public persona. "She looks so elegant, so noble."
7 July 2014
The crumbling theater in which Karl Lagerfeld staged Chanel's Couture show for Fall 2013 was a convincing evocation of a culture in ruins, bar the backdrop, which featured a perfectly airbrushed vision of a sci-fi skyline, a city of the future. That backdrop came to life tonight when Lagerfeld presented Chanel's Cruise collection in Dubai, where brushed steel towers poke at the sky in shapes that are plucked from the dreams of feverish futurologists. It's been a decade or so since the designer was last here and he scarcely recognized the place. You can only imagine how much that excited a man who regards yesterday as complete anathema. "The next step, the new reality," he declaimed enthusiastically of Dubai. "This is something totally unexpected. You couldn't imagine it fifty years ago."So it was slightly odd that the clothes Lagerfeld showed left the impression of something you might actually imagine ahundredyears ago, when Paul Poiret's injection of Eastern exoticism freed fashionable Parisians from the restrictions of the 19th century. "Better to do that than the sixties, the seventies, what everyone else does," said Lagerfeld, with nary a hint of defensiveness. "This ismyidea of a romantic, modern Orient, a newOne Thousand and One Nights." And there was no place more appropriate to offer it up than Dubai, where West and East, today and tomorrow, real and fake meet in a duty-free, shopaholic embrace. Chanel encapsulated the notion with its show space, a gigantic rectangular hangar covered in a lattice that looked on first glance like the kind of traditional Islamic fretwork that wraps the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. It was actually Chanel's interlocking double C's.Real and fake? That was the essence of the show, most obviously in the way precious and costume jewelry were mixed to confusing effect, but also in the shifting sense of time and place. Fin-de-siècle silhouettes, huge jet-set hair, Aladdin's slippers: Everything underscored the strange and wonderful hybrid that Lagerfeld has made of Chanel, from the venue—the seemingly solid hangar was an ephemeral fantasia whipped up on a strip of sand—to the post-show entertainment, a hyperkinetic performance by the exultantly ambiguous Janelle Monáe. Perfect! Ambiguity offers Lagerfeld the nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems effect that he craves.
Here, it was evident in the fabric treatments that defied immediate comprehension: clusters of beading, three-dimensional geometries, decaying tweeds and patchworks.Before his arrival, a flurry of newspaper articles trumpeted the re-ascendance of Dubai as a market hungry for prestige European labels. It was a temptation to track concessions to that market in this new Chanel collection. Lagerfeld toyed with the local design lingo in his use of gilding, fretwork, and the sickle-moon motif—plus an unfortunate outbreak of harem pants. There were also tunic tops hemmed in a sequined version of the Dubai skyline. But he didn't see concession. "The world is not that big anymore," he said dismissively. "You don't have to be from here. These clothes are for women all over the world." Still, it was telling that the clothes that exerted the most appeal were the most generically international. The plainest, in other words. Joan Smalls in layers of sand-colored crepe had a timelessly glamorous zing.Valley of the Dollsmet Valley of the Kings.
12 May 2014
If Chanel's Spring show skewered the art world for the oligarchs' supermarket it has turned into, Karl Lagerfeld went one better for Fall and imagined the whole world as a megastore—un grand magasin—under the sign of the double C. The shelves of his extraordinarily detailed set were stacked with more than a hundred thousand items, brazenly advertised at 20 or 50 percent more. No bargains in these aisles.The labels of at least five hundred everyday products had been re-coded in Chanelspeak. Personal favorites included chic black cotton buds sold asbâtonnets élégants; boxes of handkerchiefs labeled Les Chagrins de Gabrielle; house paint in a color called Gris Jersey; detergent and potato chips; and, best of all, a hardware department that featured a chain saw with a real Chanel chain. The one that most entranced the locals was the recasting of asac poubelle(garbage bag) as asac plus belle(definitely not a garbage bag). There were also doormats printed with "Mademoiselle Privé." At show's end, as a locust horde descended on the shelves, those doormats were the day's key trophy—if you could get them past the security on the door of the Grand Palais. As Supermarket Sweep as the vibe was, the only goodies up for grabs were the fresh produce and the candies.It was entrancing to see the fashion world's great and good transformed into kids in a candy store by Lagerfeld's spectacle. An epic celebration of consumerism was also an epic satire of it. An instant analogy was Andreas Gursky's gigantic99 Centdiptych. (Lagerfeld was kicking himself that he hadn't thought to invite Gursky to the show.) As a piece of conceptual art, as a critique of pop culture, as a fashion show, it offered the juicy meat of an academic thesis.Oh, yes, the fashion. Lagerfeld helped to make trainers the talking point of the Couture season. Here, he built a collection from the ground up on the footwear. "They had to continue," he said bluntly. "If you want to look really ridiculous, you go in stilettos in a supermarket." The very notion was antithetical to the guts of a collection that was just about the most democratic Lagerfeld has ever offered for Chanel. "That's exactly what I wanted to show," he said with an emphatic stab of a finger. So the Chanel catwalk accommodated an unusual variety of silhouettes and a massive range of options, from Cara Delevingne's raggy workout-wear to the sheath of clotted flowers that emerged at show's end.
Couture's definite corseting inserted itself into the collection, but there was also a raggedy-hemmed smock dress and a black velvet jumpsuit, and a prevailing sense that Lagerfeld has no interest in offering directives. With today's overwhelming, irresistible extravaganza, he was saying that fashion's a supermarket. So you might as well shop.
3 March 2014
The set of a Chanel show is the gold standard of fashion excess: icebergs, forests, the world after the world has ended…nothing is too much for Karl Lagerfeld. The set for today's couture presentation gave nothing away—an enormous glistening white tube loomed center stage, so blank that its only possible promise was revolution. And revolve it duly did. When it revolved, it revealed shaggy French pop star Sébastien Tellier, his orchestra, and two giant sweeping staircases fresh out of an Art Deco fantasia from the Hollywood thirties. No, Lagerfeld corrected, "It's an ice palace, a nightclub on another planet."He knew those stairs, the kind of stairs down which vedettes would make a grand entrance, posing every step of the way. Couture stairs. So he had his models sprint down them, as light as fairies, skipping and spinning. It was an adorably spritely fuck you to any notion of heritage. And yet Lagerfeld also strapped his fey young things into corsets with stays, the very thing that Coco herself cast off in the name of modernity nearly a century ago. He compared them to motocross belts. "This is ballroom-cross," he joked. Laughter aside, the supreme irony of corseting a Chanel woman was surely not lost on smart cookie Karl.Anyway, the corseted midriff was the core over which he laid a bolero (or crop top) and a short skirt for the collection's defining look. It was energetic, athletic…and it was really the only thing that could successfully match the footwear. Every outfit featured a couture sneaker by Massaro: python, with lace, pearls, and tweed. (If you're curious about the cost of such an item, the price tag will probably be something in the vicinity of €3,000.)In the spirit of sportiness, there were also knee and elbow pads, and there was athletic-wear transfigured: A crystallized blouson was one of the prettiest pieces in the collection. In fact, the luminescence of the trim, lively clothing seemed doubly noteworthy, given that yesterday's Dior Couture show was also about light and movement. The two most significant fashion houses in France just made a major commitment to a new generation…to the future, in fact.
20 January 2014
In Texas, they don't do anything small. Neither does Chanel. It's been a mutually beneficial match since way back in 1957, when Neiman Marcus' Stanley Marcus, having embraced Coco Chanel's 1954 comeback collection even as the French rejected it, gave Chanel the store's Award for Distinguished Service in the field of fashion. Tomorrow, Neiman's will present Karl Lagerfeld with the same honor. The full-circle moment gave Lagerfeld the theme for his fabulous new Métiers d'Art show, dubbed Back in Dallas, as well as the spectacles that preceded and followed it.A giant ice storm made getting to the city more than a little difficult, but by 6:30 this evening, nine hundred guests had poured into Dallas' Fair Park, home of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition and a National Historic Landmark. Inside, they were greeted by a built-to-fit drive-in movie theater complete with seventy-four restored vintage automobiles parked in front of four giant screens. This reporter watched Lagerfeld's short film from the front seat of a red convertible Chevrolet Chevelle.The Returnstars Geraldine Chaplin as a wary yet still brazen Coco on the eve of her 1954 show, the one that was celebrated by the Americans and panned by the French—"you can hardly call that couture," says Arielle Dombasle in the movie. "I don't think her name will last forever."The U.S. of A. got that one right. There are but a few global brands that can spend on the scale that Chanel does. (Team KL built a saloon for the after-party, installing a mechanical bull and the British electronic music band Hot Chip.) No other fashion house can lay claim to the various ateliers that Chanel has acquired in recent years. With Dakota Fanning, Lily Collins, and Kristen Stewart, who will star in the ad campaign for this collection, in the stands, Lagerfeld showcased the company's Métiers d'Art to vivid effect with clothes that trumpeted the American West—Cowboys and Indians clichés and all. Historically, Ralph Lauren has owned this fashion territory. Lagerfeld seized upon it with gusto but also with characteristic deftness."It's a reinvention of something I don't really know, but that I like to play with," he said. The classic Chanel suit has become a bit boxier, the skirt longer and fuller, and it's worn with boots. For the Lone Star State: a cocktail dress and matching jacket embroidered with thousands of red and silver stars. Houndstooth coats with fur sleeves the size of, well, Texas.
Blanket skirts and high-necked prairie blouses. And miles and miles of fringe, accenting everything from a knit poncho and skirt set to a silky dress Jerry Hall might've worn to Studio 54 to a swaggeringly gorgeous navy cape in suede and leather.Erin Wasson, a native Texan, carried bottles of Chanel No. 5 in her holsters. Bang, bang, Karl did it again.
10 December 2013
Karl Lagerfeld had a great summer: The sun shone, Choupette was happy, creative juicesgeysered. The concept and the clothes for his new collection came together at the same time. Art! You can scarcely pick up a magazine or newspaper these days without coming across something about the volatility of the art world, the millions that are being spent in the getting of pictures on which the paint is scarcely dry. It's become a huge oligarchical pissing contest, with the annual art fair in Basel, Switzerland, its most competitive arena. And Lagerfeld, antennae attuned to every wrinkle of the here and now, didn't miss a trick with his Chanel/Basel mash-up today. Right there on the soundtrack: Jay-Z's "Picasso Baby," with its accompanying video ripe with images of art-world grandees lining up at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea so they could bask in Hova's glory.The Grand Palais was transformed into a gigantic white-walled hangar of paintings and sculptures—quintessential Basel or Frieze—all seventy-five of them made by Lagerfeld during his Summer of Prodigious Creativity. He didn't actuallymakethem himself—that feat would be too Olympian even for Karl—but he drew the pieces or made maquettes so his studio could realize the finished product. Just like Jeff Koons. And, as with Koons, Karl's reference points were identifiable, though he cleverly twisted them so they each included some element of Chanel: a camellia, a pearl, a bottle of No. 5. Some of them had red dots beside their titles, like they'd already been sold. Postshow, he wearily insisted he had no intention of doing any such thing; he'd already been asked a thousand times, just like he'd been asked to sign the whole lot.The coming together of concept and design was clearly responsible for the way Lagerfeld's theme infected his collection to a greater degree than usual. "Transformative!" was Koons' response at Stella McCartney's show the other day when he was asked about the common ground between art and fashion, and the transformations the Chanel atelier achieved with the signature tweeds were nothing short of art. In fact, they weren't even tweed as we know it: They were some indefinable multi-processed hybrid of de- and reconstructed stuff that was then mounted on tulle to create outfits that were identifiable as iconic Chanel. Phew! And you can only imagine Lagerfeld's delight at fooling all of the people all of the time.
Deconstruction, trompe l'oeil, collage, bricolage—this Chanel collection was a fest of art processes. You never get the sense that Lagerfeld is pushing himself; he makes everything look much too easy for that. Nevertheless, in the ninety-ish looks he showed today, there were more stories than he would usually be bothered to tell. For instance, a paint chart from the 1900s yielded a whole group of primally Pantone-ed pieces. They were something quite new for Chanel. There were great things that looked like they'd been scissored from charcoaled canvas—again, in keeping with the theme but intriguingly raw for Chanel. And Lagerfeld's collaborators kept the dream alive with their impeccable contributions. Sam McKnight's wigs were paintbrushes-cum-Darth Vader helmets of hair. Peter Philips' makeup looked like an artist had wiped his brushes on eyelids instead of on clothes or canvas. Macabre maybe, but one more Chanel pointer to the transformative art of fashion at its most far-reaching.
30 September 2013
We were inside the Grand Palais, but we were also seated inside the auditorium of a convincingly, dangerously derelict theater. Opera wailed, the last hurrah foralt-kultur.The tattered curtains parted, and there, rising among the ruins, was a shimmering, futuristic backdrop, an Emerald City on the Far Eastern frontier. Chanel, under the fiendishly clever tutelage of Karl Lagerfeld, had yet again compelled hundreds of people to suspend disbelief, surrender to an illusion so complete that we might as well have been sitting in an audience for "the feelies," the immersive cinematic experience that Aldous Huxley, in hisBrave New World,imagined would control people in the future.Brave New World? Sticking with the sci-fi theme, there was also something of Fritz Lang'sMetropolisin the context Lagerfeld was creating. Could we view this collection as Lagerfeld's Lang moment? "My whole life is a Fritz Lang moment," he snapped back when that question was put to him. Regardless, something clicked here. The moviemaker and the fashion designer, kindred spirits in their complete control of self-willed worlds, both adept at drawing on the past to create a vision of the future. "On the way from the Old World to the New World," was Lagerfeld's summation of his spectacular mise-en-scène. "And fashion is the only way to make the trip." A valet brushed lint from his jacket as he spoke, the very image of Old World grace. Meanwhile, Rihanna and her flock of cell-phone-wielding fans, ebbing and flowing nearby, were the quintessence of the not-so-gracious New.Getting down to the clothes, Lagerfeld mentioned "tradition with future." There were period proportions and details—fichus, portrait necklines, volumes and silhouettes that evoked Victoriana, Edwardiana, Something-Elsiana—but there were also fabrics that were not of this world: eerie, diaphanous stuff, glittering circuitry, 3-D effects that felt like Escher. Lagerfeld pictured the headgear as a salute to Grace Jones, but the hairdos and defined eyebrows of the models also brought to mind Rachael the Replicant fromBlade Runner,another cinematic reference point for its marriage of past and future. In fact, you couldn't go far enough with the filmic analogies. The collection had the flickering shimmer of a movie projection. Pavéed sequins, tweeds woven with Lurex (except that it was a concatenation of embroidery, not a weave at all), gray flannel silvered to a sheen, lamé, mirrors…the sparkle of stardust, Lagerfeld called it.
In the canon of dream-induced collections from the maestro, this one would seem to come pretty high. A Fall Couture collection it might have been, but it was showing in midsummer, and that is probably the most famous dream of all.But before we got too carried away on gossamer wings, Lagerfeld had slung a wide, weighty belt around everything. And he'd rooted his designs in suede stocking boots (even if they were attached to a garter belt). Erin Wasson wore a very sensible suit in army-green tweed (with sparkle). That was only one of the serious ensembles that made up a convincing daywear offering. The venue might have been in ruins, but this show will run and run.
1 July 2013
Chanel is on vacation. It's part of the definition of its Cruise line, right there in the name. So Karl Lagerfeld led his legions to Singapore. It's boiling here, 100 degrees in the shade, but that's not to suggest Lagerfeld has slowed down a bit. On the contrary, he showed a collection—collection, he clarified, notpre-collection—as vast and various as any of his other ready-to-wear bounties. This one, though, in the spirit of Cruise, had a holidaying pluck. There was a fifties-inflected soundtrack, with snatches of Elvis and Yma Sumac courtesy of Michel Gaubert, and a bouncy ease to the key new silhouette of high-waisted, wide-leg trousers worn with what were essentially oversize T-shirts—though rendered, in appropriately luxe fashion, from white leather and tulle.That half step toward laddishness—the pearl-trimmed sort championed by the young Coco Chanel, with her menswear fabrics and her suiting, her boys' tailoring inspired by Boy's tailoring—gave the collection its sprightly freshness. After the dark glamour of Fall, with its seductive, witchy toughness, this was a lark. But a summary doesn't give Chanel's craftsmanship its due: the oceans of beaded embroidery, the slick flash of latex-gilded lace, the pitch-black lacquer on Cara Delevingne's plumed cape and skirt. Even Lagerfeld seemed struck by some of the feats. "I have a girl who works with me," he said, "the genius behind all the Chanel materials…. I can tell you, she tortures the manufacturers. She is a tough cookie." So says the toughest.The question remained: Why Singapore? The label has six stores here, and many were quick to sniff out a play for the Asian market. But Lagerfeld only shrugged and suggested, in effect, that he'd been just about everywhere else. He'd taken inspiration from some elements of Singaporean culture—most notably, the traditional black-and-white woven curtains that adorn the island's homes, which hung around the palatial venue and lent the collection its graphic palette—but further than that, Lagerfeld insisted his Singapore was a dream Singapore. He hadn't researched, not really. "I research with instinct, you see. It has to be a vague impression, but don't get into the details.Reinventthe details."But some details are too uncanny to invent. Hehadcome across a photo of a Singaporean fisherman from 1880. "The top," he said, "it's a white jacket, black braids, and four pockets. It's unbelievable. This man has a Chanel jacket." Cocoavant la lettre.
8 May 2013
"I've got my feet on the ground, but this collection isup-to-earth, notdown-to-earth." While he was speaking, Karl Lagerfeld was strategically placed under the massive globe that majestically revolved, center stage, during the Chanel presentation this morning. So the only way to earth was, in fact, up. But, figuratively speaking, the collection he showed was also "up": one of those confident, energetic, clothes-packed epics that he could probably draw in his sleep. (Not as banal as it sounds—Lagerfeld has often said he awakes from dreams and sketches a collection on the spot. He refers to it as "automatic" designing.)Bouncy confidence hasn't always produced convincing Chanel shows, but here there was a sepulchral undercurrent that was utterly seductive. The globe was dark, as though night had fallen on the world. The clothes were dark, too. And lean: a favorite silhouette fitted to the hip, then flared into a short skirt over leathercuissardes(so much better-sounding than their literal English translation, "waders"). The other key shape was equally streamlined, cut high on the thigh at the front, dipping to mid-calf at the back. This mutant redingote had a slightly libertine flair, which felt more Karl than Coco.Even though it was night, the darkling was sparkling. "Not depressing," Lagerfeld emphasized. Tweeds glittered, metallic thread brought shine to wovens. Aymeline Valade was entangled in a wonderful, shiny spirographic web. The effect was a little starlight spacey, though that impression might also have been steered by the Cardin-esque helmets some of the models were wearing. (They were, said Lagerfeld, actually facsimiles, in fur, of Anna Wintour's iconic bob.)As usual with Chanel, the fabrics defied comprehension. Anything that looked woven was just as likely to be an artful web of embroidery, like the explosions of monochrome flowers toward the end of the show. But, unlike with the couture, we were too far away for specifics, and that sense of distance underscored a point Lagerfeld wanted to make about the size of Chanel's business. The scale of the house's ready-to-wear presentations has often seemed like a metaphor in itself, and today, with the globe that revolved before our eyes, dotted with hundreds of logo-ed flags showing the location of every Chanel shop, it was even more suggestive.
If only Lagerfeld had popped out the top at the finale to straddle the planet…he's not usually one to slight a subtext, and Karl-as-Kolossos would simply have reaffirmed his role as the one and only dominator.
4 March 2013
Karl Lagerfeld can't move mountainsjustyet. Today, he had to settle for a mere forest, shipped into the Grand Palais tree by tree. His guests wandered through the woods till they happened upon a classical amphitheater. "Neo-classical," Karl clarified. He was dreaming of Weimar, sylvan hub of German Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, home to Goethe and Schiller. Connoisseurs of synchronicity might appreciate the fact that one of Schiller's best-known plays wasMary Stuart.She was the inspiration for the pre-fall spectacle Lagerfeld staged for Chanel in Edinburgh last month.Only last month? What is this man made of to be able to turn round and produce another, quite distinct collection of equal richness and complexity? The concept of spreading oneself too thin is clearly as alien to Lagerfeld as the notion of gaining one single, solitary kilo. "I always feel I can do better," he said after the show. "The minute you think you did it, you should stop."And better he did this time—maybe even the best, in a while at least. The romance of Weimar infused a couture collection whose substance was glitter and shine. The daytime tweeds sparkled, the evening looks were a hymn to the sequin. The silhouette was determined by a feature Lagerfeld called "frame shoulders." Sometimes they looked articulated, almost like armor. Other times they were fichu-like. They were intended, the designer explained, to highlight the neck, rising swanlike from the shoulders, like "the cleavage thing from the Second Empire." When he inserted a top in luminous white or silver into his frame shoulders, Lagerfeld got himself a couture reflector. "Shine is beautiful for the summer," he said. "It lights the face."Weimar was also the birthplace of the Bauhaus, and there was something of that design movement's rigor in long, lean evening columns. Anything that looked like a print was actually embroidery—the man-hours involved in such technical feats clearly involved rigors of another kind.Beautiful as the collection was—and ending as it did withtwobrides, the designer's poke at the gay-marriage controversy currently roiling France—its most striking feature was its melancholic mood. This wasn't so much one for the Karlettes, Lagerfeld's coterie of young female fans. "Art de vivre,notjoie de vivre," Lagerfeld agreed.
Hair and makeup featured feathery effects, as though the models were birds in the woods, but a Miss Havisham quality crept in toward the end, as the feathers settled over shoulders and trailed behind dresses. "There's nothing more elegant than a certain kind of melancholia," Lagerfeld mused. And surely there is nothing that induces melancholia like the transience of beauty.Not that Karl would ever allow himself a moment to reflect on such things—or even to savor his triumph. Nope, he was off to the atelier, where he would spend the afternoon fitting his next ready-to-wear collection.
21 January 2013
"Dressed to kilt." Get real, how else was Karl Lagerfeld going to define the collection he showed for Chanel outside of Edinburgh tonight? The tweeds, the knits, the cardigans, the man-styled essence of Chanel all came from Scotland and the time that Coco spent there with her lover the Duke of Westminster. But tonight's venue was Linlithgow Palace, where Mary, Queen of Scots, was born almost exactly seven centuries ago, and her tragic life gave Lagerfeld the perfect opportunity to gloss Chanel's easy pragmatism with an element of doomed romance. It was a fantastic combination.Maybe that's because it was kind of personal for the designer. The first French poem he ever learned, at the age of six, was all about Mary. Then there's that umbilical connection between Scotland and France, which history recognizes as the Grand Alliance. And in Lagerfeld's team tonight, he had Sam McKnight on hair and Stella Tennant on all-round fabulosity. In other words, there was something quintessentially Scottish in the air. "Barbarian romance," Lagerfeld called it.Linlithgow's courtyard was lined with flaming braziers, spitting sparks into the snow flurries. Guests made their way up spiral stone stairs to the palace's great hall and chapel, open to the heavens since marauding Hanoverians torched the building in January 1746. After the show, they made their way back down a labyrinthine wooden construction to dinner in a tented fantasia that had hardened souls gasping with wonder. This was the irreality that a fashion show transported us to in December 2012. It sure beats coal mining for a daily crust. With impressive ease, Lagerfeld translated the sense of occasion into something that grandly allied Chanel's original Parisian proportions with Scottish tradition. Picture Stella Tennant in a drop-waisted kilt-pleated coat. But also imagine that kilt in chiffon and lace. And the tartans and tweeds, the Fair Isles and argyles that would have garbed lords and ladies of the glen reconfigured in languid knits and patchwork, layered in swingy jackets, accessorized as delightfully with jewels, feathered hats, flowing scarves, and patterned tights as one could wish from a collection that was created to celebrate the "métiers d'art" of the Chanel ateliers.True, there were a few costume-y moments, in which it looked like the models had slithered straight off a canvas in the National Gallery of Scotland.
A final passage of white wool gowns touched with lace and feathers, meanwhile, was an almost operatic exercise in pure technique. There's always the sense with Chanel that Lagerfeld shows much more than he needs to, and that was the case here. Still, this was a sterling collection of clothes for a day you can only imagine being a hell of a lot better than the one that will greet you tomorrow morning.
3 December 2012
From icebergs to apocalypse, Chanel's stage sets have established the goalposts for Napoleonic excess in fashion. Today's backdrop featured a wind farm and solar panels. The reason? "The wind and sun are free," Karl Lagerfeld said disingenuously. They would have been the only things that were, in a presentation that was so overwhelming in its scale it was no easy task for the sweet clothes to make an impression. Still, there were clear messages. The silhouette was dominated by an A-line or a bolero. Lagerfeld loved the skirt dress—pulled up in a bustier style—as opposed to the shirtdress. (In chambray, it said all you need to know about the ever-younger spirit of Karl's Chanel, with its supporting cast of new muses.) The graphic quality felt new, in keeping with the stripey shirt and tie the designer himself wore. He claimed his three-dimensional cutouts in chiffon dresses were designed to introduce airiness to volume. "Normally they don't go together," Lagerfeld offered. Maybe it was that desire for lightness—in what has been an often dark season—that also saw him shelve the braid, the buttons, and the chains in favor of a liberal scattering of pearls.There is always so much on a Chanel catwalk that a slightly schizophrenic quality inevitably begins to insinuate itself. Did a cobalt blue smock top truly come from the same creative source as sheer, tatter-trimmed hostess pajamas? But in the end, the path of excess did lead to the palace of wisdom, or at least the clarity of dressy white pieces appliquéd with flowers that looked like candy wrappers. Sweetness prevailed.Back to that set: Lagerfeld was in love with the architectural modernism of the wind turbines, but the message of sustainable energy seemed particularly pertinent to a designer who possesses the resilience of a man a quarter his age. "Energy is the most important thing in life" were Lagerfeld's words from the wise. "The rest comes later."
1 October 2012
Maybe it's because he speaks so fast that there always seems to be a slight undertow of scorn in Karl Lagerfeld's aperçus. "In fashion, the future is six months," he practically spat after Chanel's Couture show today. That could be why he took New Vintage as his theme. "Vintage is depressing," Lagerfeld clarified. "But 'new vintage' is something to come. It's preparation for something that could last."The show was staged in the Grand Palais, as has become custom, but this time Lagerfeld used the Salon d'Honneur, a space that had been closed off for 70 years. The walls were painted, the ceiling and door surrounds customized to an interior design concept that Coco Chanel used in her originalsalon de couture. But here it was refreshed. "A renovation of the existing spirit for our time," Lagerfeld said.Renovation wasn't, however, the thrust of the actual collection. It was far lessjeune fillethan it's been of late. When Jamie Bochert and Stella Tennant stepped out on the catwalk, they looked like substantial women of character. Their clothes had a 1940's line—broad shoulders, swingy coat, cape backs—in a color palette of black, gray, silver, and dusty pink that spoke of film noir interiors. Their hair also had a forties flavor, with a Rosie the Riveter snood. In other words, there was nothingnewabout this particular vintage. But it worked, in a gutsy, grown-up way. Lagerfeld's portrait of Chanel adorned the invitation and, in keeping with that nod to heritage, the spine of the collection was suits. Except that the classic tweed was actually embroidery on tulle. Thousands of hours of handwork. Couture in excelsis.Lagerfeld paired the suits with sparkling hose and wove silver through his "tweeds." There was gilding galore. "These clothes are for a world of privileged people," he said, with a hint of resignation (surely not scorn). And it was a wide world of clothes on display: an ethereal gilet spun from what looked like thistledown followed hard and less than coherently on the heels of a tracksuit in dégradé sequins. But that wayward abundance has always been the rule with Lagerfeld's Chanel. And who knows how that tracksuit will look on the block at Sotheby's in 50 years?
2 July 2012
Karl Lagerfeld was exultant. Twelve months of planning for Chanel's 2013 Cruise presentation and, the week before the big day, current events conspired to completely recontextualize the show, injecting a delicious layer of irony into the time and place. His succinct summation—"Versailles in a Socialist France"—said it all. Up until last week's election, which restored a left-wing government to power, Lagerfeld's collection was a gleeful mash-up of hip-hop edge—à la his favorite Azealia Banks or M.I.A.—and Louis Quatorze's eighteenth-century court at Versailles, the focal point of a period that history recognizes as France's last Golden Age, with Louis the Sun King at its pinnacle. Soundmeister Michel Gaubert dubbed the hybrid "Ghetto royale." He obliged Karl with an M.I.A. track whose refrain, "Live fast, die young/Bad girls do it well," might have been Marie Antoinette's musical signature if she'd lived a couple centuries later. She might even have joined Alice Dellal and Karla Lagerfeldas, who played an exuberantly retro-punk set at the post-show cocktail.Lagerfeld has proved himself a master of this high-low hybrid in recent times. Here, formal eighteenth-century details, like panniers and fichus, were re-created in casual twenty-first-century fabrics—chambray, tech denims, even plastics—dressed up with frothy lace ruffles and cuffs, and dressed down with gold platform trainers and short shorts. Occasionally awkward though it may have been, the lightness, the girlishness, of the clothes had a balletic quality, reflective perhaps of Louis' own love of dance. Lagerfeld said he wanted something floating and frivolous. "Frivolity is a healthy attitude," he said after the show. "I know people who were saved by frivolity."But the levity of that declaration was lent some provocative weight by the election. Clearly equating President-elect François Hollande's incoming government with a general shriveling of the French jeu d'esprit (although that is, in itself, something of a myth), Lagerfeld went on to say, "I don't want the rest of the world to think of France as a sad, gloomy country. They won't come to buy our products." A worrying prospect for someone who never fails to crowd his catwalk with an overabundance of clothing and accessories. "Too many ideas," wailed Inès de la Fressange jokily as she leaned in to bestow a congratulatory kiss. "Too creative.
" Lagerfeld glazed one tweed in gold, sequined another in pale blue, embroidered a tiny sundress with gold bullion, and applied the most delicate floral beading to snowy white handkerchief linen. Watercolor florals suggested Watteau maidens; male models Brad Kroenig and Jon Kortajarena were dressed in britches as their swains. "It's nothing that literal," Lagerfeld insisted, but the Rococo echoes added some charm.The show took place around three of the furiously spouting fountains for which Versailles is famous. Guests then trained through the grounds to the cocktail at the Bosquet des Rocailles, where Louis staged theatrical productions. (Could it be true that Marie Antoinette's "farm," the private playpen where she'd go to play-act ordinary folks, was just through the trellised fence?) Speaking of imperial whim, look no further than the gall of the guy who persisted with plans for a ginormous outdoor spectacle while the heavens were blessing Paris with six weeks of nonstop rain. Guess what? Glorious Sol came out on cue. So who's the Sun King now?
13 May 2012
Karl Lagerfeld thrives on the new. And he's happy to share his thirst for novelty with the massive audience at his biannual Chanel spectaculars. In today's often enthralling show, there was the new proportion of a three-piece suit—jacket, skirt, and pants. (Well,almostnew. Lagerfeld has tried that before, but this time, he got it right.)There was new music (Michel Gaubert soundtracked the proceedings with a not-yet-released number by Tristesse Contemporaine). And there was a credit no one would have seen at a fashion show before: eyebrows by Lesage, the legendary couture embroidery house. The strips of crystal that defined each model's brows were a microcosmic rendition of the show's grand design, which featured a set that looked like the Fortress of Solitude."Nature's the greatest designer," said Lagerfeld, pointing at some of the more spectacular crystalline excrescences. "These shapes are millions of years old." He lavished crystals on hems and cuffs as the trim on coats and the heels of shoes. And he indulged his new mineralogical bent with the mica sparkle in the dark tweeds that opened the show, in jeans with the streaky grain of rock formations, in the knits that looked like layers of sediment, and in a scatter of moonstones across a sweater dress.But Lagerfeld also found a man-made co-relative for Nature's geometry in an exhibition of Czech cubism he saw in Prague. So there was angular cubist articulation in sleeves—a new silhouette, in other words—and in the polyhedron decoration of coats. The abstract color-blocking also had a vaguely cubist feel.Ah yes, color. Karl felt it was time to bring it back, after last Fall's monochrome and Spring's pastels. But as it turned out, the colored pieces didn't fare so well against those penumbral tweeds, or the oily glisten of the feathered pieces that closed the show. It was much easier to imagine the younger customer that Lagerfeld has so successfully courted for Chanel being drawn to the dark side.
5 March 2012
One hundred fifty shades of blue. Obviously, everyone is going to jump on that extraordinary stat from Chanel's Couture show today. Why blue? Karl Lagerfeld is too much of a polymath to nail any one reason for anything he does, but he's a wicked player of word association games. Elvis' "Blue Moon," Miles'Kind of Blue, blue-sky optimism…"Anything but the blues," he said post-show. "Idon'thave the blues."Hardly. The vision presented by the Chanel show was streamlined, upbeat, and forward-looking, quite the contrast with the decadent-Raj, drowned-world, and scorched-earth scenarios that Lagerfeld arranged around his most recent collections. Today's guests took their seats in a simulacrum of a commercial space shuttle flight that, during the course of the show, left the Earth's atmosphere and headed for space. Toward the finale, the Earth actually passed overhead, across the clear dome that allowed passengers a view of the starry sky outside.But the collection was scarcely the futurist extravaganza that such a setup promised. The key point in the presentation was a new fashion attitude. It's the sort of lip service notion to which designers often tip their caps, but in Lagerfeld's case, he delivered. How? By elongating his proportion even lower than dropped waist to thigh-top, so that when the models walked with their hands tucked in slash pockets, they looked, the designer said, "like boys whose jeans are slipping off." The boy/girl thing is a Chanel staple, and Lagerfeld has found a contemporary exemplar in Alice Dellal, who today was placed in the peculiar position of watching dozens of women styled to look just like her parading past her front-row perch. Think of stretched-out necks and pushed-up sleeves on sweatshirts and you've got other key components of the silhouette.The youthful slouchiness of the attitude was a counterpoint to the byzantine complexity of the techniques that created the clothes. "A lot of it isn't even fabric," Lagerfeld said. "It's embroidery." And if it wasn't that, it was cellophane. Or something else unlikely. And yet, there was a classic elegance about the result. The stretched-out neck was a portrait neckline, the pushed-up sleeves were a perfect bell. The long, lean length that ended just above the ankle was culture incarnate. And the cellophane shimmered like the finest silk.
23 January 2012
Karl Lagerfeld has never been to India. "It's much more inspiring not to go to places than to go," he said today after a Chanel presentation that spectacularly evoked the sights, smells, and sounds of the last days of the Raj. OK, Michel Gaubert's sitar-free soundtrack might have been a stretch (unless the Raj was rocking to David Lynch's new album), but the towering tiers of fruits, sweets, and flowers that filled the center of the room definitely had a sense of palatial excess. They were circled by a toy train bearing decanters of…what was it that maharajas drank? scotch?…which rang true as a decadent detail, conveying the notion of a privileged few playing while empires crumbled. Sound familiar?Lagerfeld resisted such topical insinuations, but he did concede that fashion historically tends to come into its excessively creative own during difficult economic times. A perfect moment for him, in other words. And this collection, an annual salute to the work of the craftspeople who make Chanel happen, including the recently passed François Lesage (hence the name, Métiers d'Art), was definitely a feat of creative excess, from the jaw-dropping set, which turned a curved space under the dome of the Grand Palais into a corner of Rajasthan, to the clotted silver embroideries, the gilded laces, the lustrous silks that determined the character of the clothes.It's easy to imagine a canny designer making the decision to aim such shine and glitter at an emergent market feeling its fashion oats (I'm talking about India, BTW), but Lagerfeld's post-show declaration that bling was dated made it clear that he had something else on his mind. The theme "Paris-Bombay" was a reminder that Europe's fashion industry has increasingly turned to India to produce extravagantly handworked pieces as it has become prohibitively expensive to make them at home. Lagerfeld's fiendish plan was to flip the equation, so that everything that looked intricately Indian was actually made by Chanel's ateliers in Paris. That was some kind of tour de force.All that aside, Paris and Bombay blended beautifully in pearl-swagged tweeds, in a raw silk tunic over leggings (they were actually sinuously bootlike, so we should probably call them beggings or loots), in sheer paisleys, or side-draped asymmetry in ivory silk. The elegance of a lightly peplumed jacket and matching skirt in ivory silk had absolutely nothing to do with geography. It was simply French chic.
Not everything worked—there was a queen-of-the-fairies moment that felt like a malfunction of Florence's machine—but the sheer prodigious extravagance of the dream world that Lagerfeld pours onto his catwalk collection after collection allows for the flaw—the merest flaw—once in a while.
5 December 2011
For today's Chanel spectacular, Karl Lagerfeld recast himself as Prospero, conjuring a magical underwater world from the raw stuff of fashion. The Grand Palais was transformed by huge, blinding white sea shapes—corals, shells, sea horses, stingrays—and Florence Welch arose like Botticelli's Venus on the half shell to sing "What the Water Gave Me." It was a bravura performance all around.What the water gave Karl was the kind of acute overview that only he could turn into a dazzling collection. He'd been musing on the fact that forms as modern as anything designed by the architect Zaha Hadid have been shaped at the bottom of the ocean by natural processes taking millions of years. Chanel hasn't been in existence forquitethat long, but there was an impressive, graphic modernity shaped by lengthy natural processes (Karl's thoughts) in most of the 80 or so outfits that strolled around today's massive set. Lagerfeld said he wanted lightness. He'd used new fabrics even he didn't know how to define. They brought an iridescent mother-of-pearl shimmer to the collection—the lightness literally shone through. That was also why Lagerfeld strung pearls, instead of belts, around waists. And Sam McKnight dotted pearls through the models' slicked-back hair, too.Lagerfeld's aim was nothing too "Chanel" because, he sagely noted, there are already so many other people doing that style. Still, he insisted on something that was recognizably within the codes of the house. So there were boxy tweeds, drop waists, mille-feuille pleats, and an ocean of prettiness for the fans. It was enthralling to watch the way he insinuated his underwater theme into this traditional Chanel lexicon. The ruffles on one dress looked like sea sponges, the iridescent streamers flying from another like seaweed. It wasn't always successful—one of Stella Tennant's outfits sprouted unfortunate seaweed panniers—but how many other designers are there who are prepared to take such risks after six decades in the business? Strike that. Who has this much energy and creativity atanyage?
3 October 2011
Karl Lagerfeld recently acquired a full set of stills from 1927's apocalyptic sci-fi classicMetropolis, signed by the film's director Fritz Lang to its young star Brigitte Helm. It was sheer coincidence, however, that there was aMetropolisfeel to the set for today's Chanel haute couture show. Or was it? The backdrop for the presentation was a neon-limned mock-up of the Place Vendôme, with Napoleon replaced at the top of his column by a robot Coco. (In Lang's movie, a mad scientist makes a robot replica of Helm.) The set was dark and glistening, like rain had just fallen. A perfect film noir atmosphere, in other words. And Lagerfeld had the perfect script for it—Coco's own life story.At least that was one way to look at a collection that seemed to chop through time. It clearly wasn't a chronological arc. The show opened with Chanel tweed suits, which didn't make their appearance until the twenties, and it closed with "lamp shade" evening silhouettes that echoed the work of Paul Poiret, the early twentieth-century Parisian designer whom Chanel helped render irrelevant with her innovations. Michel Gaubert's soundtrack, meanwhile, created an aural equivalent of the temporal mash-up by following new English pop with bursts of Stravinsky (he was Coco's lover in the twenties). But Lagerfeld had already prepared us for this when he called the collection Les Allures de Chanel. Plural—he wanted to emphasize her multifacetedness.But, if the clothes themselves were any guide, he also wanted to preserve Coco's mystery. The collection was so dominated by shades of black, gray, and midnight blue that the odd accents of fuchsia looked like less-than-happy accidents. Even when Lagerfeld used white, he defused it with a drizzle of dark beading or a shadowy veil or even a glittery black tank. The mood felt like an organic follow-on from the dystopia of the Fall ready-to-wear show. As with that collection, the lack of compromise, particularly with the tricky peplum-over-narrow-skirt silhouette, could challenge brand fans. But the somber luxury of the wardrobe Karl Lagerfeld is proposing for dark times is immensely seductive.
4 July 2011
"Billion-dollar babes." Karl-ette Caroline Sieber nailed the essence of the Cruise collection that Lagerfeld showed for Chanel tonight. The venue—the Hotel du Cap, in Antibes on the French Riviera—is, as the designer himself pointed out, possibly the most expensive hotel in the world, and he booked out the whole joint a year ago for however many days it took to get this show on the runway. Plus, he'd flown in a cast of top models and glamorous front-row horseflesh. Plus plus, he accessorized his looks with real jewels, diamonds, and pearls, like the comet of sparklers that traced the armhole on Karolina Kurkova's top. "Too much may not be enough," Lagerfeld mused at show's end.He was reflecting on the world of difference between Saint-Tropez, where he showed his last Cruise collection a year ago, and Antibes, which is a few hours down the coast. "This is the other side of paradise," he said, meaning that the Hotel du Cap defines a degree of extravagance that former fishing village Saint-Tropez doesn't aspire to. But, diamonds aside, quite how the notion of a schism of excess crossed over to the clothes Karl showed wasn't as clear. He claimed he was inspired by Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan, former hot-blooded habitués of the Hotel du Cap, but the lean silhouette he opted for was more cerebral than sensual, even if the opening hits of broom yellow and lilac did suggest local summer flora and the soundtrack was pumping red-hot Prince. Jackets were seamed close to the body, skirts ended below the knee in a kick pleat. Then the collection expanded into an almost-infinity of options. "I saw everything from a day at the beach to a wedding," said the actress Rachel Bilson.Which meant that this collection lacked the focus that made Fall's ready-to-wear, for instance, such a dystopian tour de force. Kristen McMenamy in a bathing suit and dramatic black and white wrap shared runway space with Stella Tennant in a pleated mid-calf dress in navy crepe that was topped by a long, sleeveless vest. Such variables are a smart commercial move, given that Chanel's Cruise collection stays in stores longer than any other of the collections that Lagerfeld designs each year for the label. Judged as a series of stand-alone items, it was easy to extract some immediate winners: the full trousers slashed up the calf, the floaty three-quarter-length dresses with the shirred midriffs, Natasha Poly's white beaded sheath.
Elsewhere, Lagerfeld's claim that it is his "job to challenge" produced a hard-to-get-around oddity like the hybrid thong-boot footwear. Perhaps that could be rationalized as the shoe for someone who has everything else her heart could possibly desire, in keeping with what the designer saw as the spirit of the locale. But there are some desires that are clearly better left unsatisfied.
8 May 2011
"The world is a dark place," acknowledged Karl Lagerfeld after the latest Chanel spectacle, which took place amid a fog-shrouded forest on a bed of still-smoldering scorched earth. There was some of the apocalyptic grandeur of German artists Caspar David Friedrich and Anselm Kiefer, and a bit more of the post-apocalyptic grit of Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road, but, as Lagerfeld himself noted, the models walked into and out of huge glowing squares of white light at each end of the catwalk. And isn't going into the light usually the way out of the dark place? At least it was inPoltergeist.The dramatic setting and Michel Gaubert's thundering orchestral revision of the Cure's seminal goth classic "A Forest" were matched by Lagerfeld's designs. He elaborated on the audacious theme he established for Spring, where jackets and coats looked moth-eaten or tattered. Here, many of the looks had the ashy appearance of clothes that had weathered a natural disaster (a volcanic eruption, perhaps?) because they'd been packed tightly in a trunk. The denim leggings carried over from Couture were distressed. The way Lagerfeld doubled a classic Chanel dogtooth over a substantial double-vented man's jacket (they were actually attached as one piece) or a cropped tweed over what looked like a combat jacket hinted at the hasty expediency of dressing any which way in a hurry when the lava's on the way. It was also one of the most striking instances yet of the boy/girl thing that is a major Fall trend.The palette stayed shadowy throughout, the proportions slightly man-sized, with rounded shoulders. Even the more overtly "feminine" pieces looked like damaged goods, say a skirt of spectacularly shredded chiffon or a pair of full-length knit sheaths that dissolved into loose strands of wool at the back. The tunics, capes, and tabards added a neo-medieval twist to Lagerfeld's grunge-y fairy tale. Then the whole story took a left turn into gothic with the black lace eveningwear. The jumpsuited models could have been twenty-first-century brides of Dracula. Stella Tennant wore an option that was in keeping with the crepuscular heart of the collection: a sequin-encrusted jacket over a shawl-collared tux. Plus, she was sporting bike boots.Aside from the mesmerizing scenario, the collection's genius lay in Lagerfeld's supernatural prescience about the way a lot of young women want to dress now, mixing the street with enough high fashion fantasy to make the result seem rich and strange.
The proof? After the show, Karl's coterie of bright young things—Lily and Leigh and Jen and Poppy and all the others—couldn't wait to surrender to his dark vision.
7 March 2011
Let there be light. No designer is as primed for that kind of heavenly decree as Karl Lagerfeld, and he heeded the call with aChanelcollection that was positively luminous in its delicacy and sparkle. Dresses that looked spun from gossamer ("morning dew on spiderwebs" was his cohort Amanda Harlech's more lyrical metaphor) weren't fabric; they were pieces of embroidery. Ten million beads were used in all. The result was literally a cloth of light.But light is not only illumination; it's also a lack of heaviness. There was a precise, balletic grace to the shifts, the tops, the fitted jackets, and floating chiffons, all of them built on sequined leggings. And every model walked in a ballet flat. "Just the point of the shoe," Lagerfeld was quick to point out. It was bound to the ankle by transparent straps, and it completely changed the attitude of the show. All those teenage models who look like ball-breaking vixens in their face paint and vertiginous heels when they walk for other designers were suddenly turned back into pretty girls in flat soles and clothes the color of a dawn sky. "I was sick of all those Eiffel Towers, sick of all those violent colors," said Lagerfeld.He dazzlingly wove his antidote to current fashion orthodoxy into the fabric of the house. Artist Marie Laurencin was his inspiration. In 1923, she designedLes Biches, a ballet commissioned by Diaghilev with a scenario by Cocteau. Chanel was designingLe Train Bleufor the ballet impresario at the same time. She asked Laurencin to paint her. The languor and sweetness of the portrait that came from the sitting weren't pleasing to Chanel, but Lagerfeld seized on those qualities to reinterpret her ethos in a way that was paradoxically provocative and modest. The pink bouclé suit, the drop-waist dress, the sugary, rough-edged tweeds were fragile where Chanel herself was steely.Lagerfeld himself acknowledged the dichotomy when he paraded Stella Tennant like the Black Queen in a gown of sequined chevrons, but his heart clearly lay with the White Queen Freja, whose coat-dress looked like it had been stitched from ice crystals. Then, at show's end, he massed his models on the steps of a simulacrum of the iconic Rue Cambon salon. He has made Chanel's world his own.
24 January 2011
"After the Grand Palais, I had to do the opposite," Karl Lagerfeld said, tongue only partially in cheek, atChanel's Métier d'Arts show in Paris tonight. Indeed, the cozy, intimate proceedings landed at the end of the spectrum furthest from the grand-scale Spring 2011 spectacle that had dared you not to drop your jaw. For that matter, it was equidistant from last year's pre-fall show: a Shanghai extravaganza with a thousand guests taking it all in on a pontoon on the Huangpu River.Instead, Lagerfeld had transformed the second-floor couture salon at the brand's iconic Rue Cambon store into a sort of Ottomanesque chill-out room, with low stained glass tables and two rows of patterned square pillows to seat the 136 fashion folk—mostly a hometown crowd—in attendance. It was so low-key it felt as if Uncle Karl had invited over a few friends—you know, friends like Inès, Diane, Charlotte, Tatiana, and Clémence. But you only had to look at the salon walls, entirely embroidered for the occasion in tiny bronze sequins, to know that intimacy doesn't equal skimping in the house that Coco built.The season's theme, Paris-Byzance, Lagerfeld explained, was inspired by the Empress Theodora and the lost culture of Byzantium. In typically rapid-fire mode, he noted: "Theodora was a circus artist who became empress, like Chanel, who was a little singer and became a fashion empress." Ba-domp-bomp! Mostly, however, the reference came via Coco's Byzantine-inspired Gripoix jewelry, which is instantly recognizable even today.Lagerfeld's take on it cross-pollinated the fifth century with sixties London. Call it "Granny Takes a Trip to Constantinople." These dolly birds wear their swingy navy peacoats trimmed with exquisite little jeweled buttons; their every square-heeled boot, black leather glove, and quilted handbag come encrusted with big glittering stones. And to upgrade that messy beehive: a filigree headband. The bohemia was possibly at its hautest in the amazing multicolored knits made decadent with gold thread, embroidered fringe, and chunky gold chains knitted right in.For those modern-day empresses who are Chanel's clientele, there was some truly beautiful suiting meticulously decked out in more gold chains, braiding, jeweled buttons, feathers, and fringe.
And for evening: either heavy jewel-tone satin with even heavier swaths of mosaic embroidery—as if you were wearing a chunk of a church, and we mean that in the best possible sense—or, on the lighter side, black silk edged with snaking stones. One of the strongest evening looks, a floaty and only moderately embroidered plum silk number, looks predestined for the red carpet. (Hope you were paying attention, Ms. Kruger.)The Métier d'Arts show is about flexing the muscles of the artisans that the label has gathered under its umbrella. It's about the little black dress crafted from little silk and feather flowers using a level of craftsmanship that's almost gone the way of Byzantium. If last pre-fall was about recognizing the future, set as it was in the very market that every luxury label is trying its hardest to crack, then this, in a sense, was about recognizing the past. Even an inveterate anti-nostalgist like Lagerfeld knows that solidifying and celebrating Chanel's heritage is one key to remaining a powerhouse in the decades to come.
6 December 2010
Karl Lagerfeld gets a lot of his inspiration from dreams, but he didn't need any help from them today, because he already hadLast Year at Marienbad, that hallucinatory slice of avant-garde celluloid from the early sixties, on his mind. Some would say that, despite its storied reputation, it's the most boring movie ever made, but for Lagerfeld—and Chanel—it inspired a breathtakingly surreal setting: a monochrome ornamental garden, complete with fountains, which mirrored one of the film's most famous scenes. A full orchestra of 80 musicians sawed through romantic arrangements of Björk, the Verve, and John "007" Barry to soundtrack the 18-minute show (positively epic by today's ADD standards). The models, meanwhile, paraded in a carefully schematic way that had a little ofMarienbad's arch, rigorous formality. It all conspired to make the boldness of the clothes even more audacious.It was as though Lagerfeld had taken scissors to Chanel—or maybe unleashed a cloud of ninja moths. The first outfits were riddled with holes that recalled Rei Kawakubo's "new lace," so radical in the early eighties. After the show, the designer said new fabrics were one of his touchstones for the collection, but he distressed them with selvedge, ragged edges, and a lattice of perforations. That chaotic quality persisted in dégradé chiffon florals or a monochrome tweed patchwork. The classic suit was reconfigured as a swingy A-line jacket with three-quarter sleeves and shorts as often as skirts. Almost everything had an unfinished feel, a thready, feathered edge. It loaned an enthralling urgency, and the fierce young spirit in the collection could be read as a swingeing riposte to the cutesiness that sometimes overtakes Chanel's ready-to-wear. There were more than 80 models in the show, and each outfit created a character so individual that the clothes truly held their own against the majestic backdrop.Marienbadseeded the collection in another way. Coco Chanel herself designed Delphine Seyrig's clothes for the film, and they were echoed in a final passage of black lace dresses tufted with coq feathers. It was a slightly wild detail that made a perfect capstone to this captivating show, even more so when the sea of black was interrupted by Carmen Kass, undulating down the surreal allée in a quivering cloud of apricot feathers.
4 October 2010
Karl Lagerfeld has often insisted that his collections come to him in dreams, but following his new Chanel couture show, he claimed the dream this time had been a nightmare. "No, no, just kidding," he quickly added, but there was a weight to the clothes that suggested a darker thread in Chanel this season. Compared to the glistening sci-fi whites of his Spring couture, these looks had a moody tinge. The colors, for a start: maroon, loden, navy, brown, camel. Next, the fabrics. As the show unfolded, there were velvet trims on shadow plaids, crystal trims on camel, fur trims on tweed. Dark tapestry was crusted with embroidery and beading. Imperial gold detailing against a field of navy sequins made Freja Beha Erichsen look like a girl waiting for her Ruritanian soldier.Then there were the proportions—tiered, short-over-long. A cropped jacket with elbow-length sleeves topped a high-waisted, to-the-knee skirt—a look that combined elongation and bulk in a way that was intriguing though likely to pose a challenge to many bodies. How would it gel with the Leightons, Blakes, and Jessicas in their front-row perches? But if the collection had a difficult aspect, it also felt brave in its boldness and focus. In place of the magpie glee that can make a Chanel show such a sensory overload, there was an almost military discipline here, even as the parade grew more elaborate with each passing outfit. The combination of voluptuousness and severity could have bordered on an arch libertine sensibility, but barely brushed hair and fresh, girlish makeup added a vital lightness.The ever-precise Lagerfeld is a textbook Virgo, but in honor of Chanel the Leo, he filled the Grand Palais with a vast and marvelous lion. Its paw rested on a huge globe—a Chanel pearl, perhaps—from which the models emerged. Befitting a collection that had the courage of its convictions, this was a fierce, awe-inspiring creature—one that could have sprung from a dream or even a nightmare.
5 July 2010
It was like something out of a quintessential Riviera movie. With the sun setting over the sea, hundreds of Chanel's invited guests sitting in the red wooden chairs of Saint-Tropez's famous Sénéquier, and many more onlookers piling onto balconies and pressing against barricades, Natasha Poly, Anja Rubik, and the rest of Karl Lagerfeld's cast arrived at Quai Jean Jaurès via speedboat. And like the carefree starlets and jet-setters they were channeling, the models traipsed down the street-cum-runway often barefoot, wearing seventies-ish diaphanous caftans, long crocheted dresses, ruffle-lapelled silk jersey trouser suits, and patchwork denim skirts. Tanned and toned midriffs peeked out beneath a cropped sweater here or a button-down there, its hems tied in a saucy bow.Some of the pieces, like Freja Beha Erichsen's white silk Mick Jagger tuxedo, were making repeat performances, having appeared inRemember Now, the Lagerfeld-directed short film that screened at the Cinéma de la Renaissance the night before. The Stones front man, of course, married Bianca in just such an outfit in Saint-Tropez's town hall back in 1971. Magdalena Frackowiak, doing a spot-on Brigitte Bardot shimmy, danced her way toward the photo pit in a black and white checked maillot. And for the finale, there was Georgia May Jagger, with her dad's tune "Let's Spend the Night Together" for an accompaniment. A dead ringer for Bardot circaAnd God Created Womanif there ever was one, the pouty-lipped model got to take a spin in a beaded minidress and thigh-high boots on the back of a tricked-out Harley.To be sure, there was a nostalgic mood to the affair. (Cue the sly plot ofRemember Now, in which the French actor Pascal Greggory stars as a veteran playboy encountering today'sjeunesse doréeen route to a seventies costume party or singing along to a record by sixties icon Sacha Distel.) What prompted these witty nods to the past from a designer who famously has no patience for such fusty concepts as the "good old days"? The location surely had something to do with it. Recent Chanel shows have been set in Venice and Shanghai, both of which were influential in one way or another to Coco herself. And though Lagerfeld pointed out that "Chanel was spotted here once in '34 by Colette," Saint-Tropez feels much more like Karl's kind of town. "I spent many years of my life here," he said. "I know Saint-Tropez like I know Paris. The collection is very casual, very down-to-earth.
" Key, of course, is that lightness of touch, the sense of enjoyment and ease. And with fashion once again experiencing a 1970's revival, the show also ended up feeling—as Lagerfeld's Chanel outings often do—very much of the moment.The trio of cropped bouclé tweed jackets, bikini tops, and belted high-waisted brown denim flares could've gone straight from the catwalk to the after-party (at least, if there'd been less chill in the air). Post-show at the VIP Room dinner, Lagerfeld was flanked by Vanessa Paradis, Diane Kruger, Anna Mouglalis, and Elisa Sednaoui, each one more gorgeous and glamorous than the next. Who says things were better back when? Tonight's scene was enough to make Roger Vadim and Mick Jagger both very jealous indeed.
10 May 2010
Freja Beha Erichsen and three bears on an ice floe. This was the arctic scene at Chanel, where giant chunks of bona fide iceberg, specially transported from Scandinavia, formed the frozen landscape around which models solemnly splashed through a sea of 'berg-melt in shaggy snow boots with ice-block heels.The Karl conceit of the season, no surprises, was an in-every-way extravagant play on Coco in cold weather. Using more fur than he'd even flung at Fendi—the twist being that here the fur was fake—Lagerfeld steered this collection nearer to couture than ready-to-wear than ever. Fur was woven into brown tweeds; formed deep pelmets on the lower half of leather jackets; became almost igloo-shaped capes, bonnets, even—for goodness' sake—furry trousers. Meanwhile, the suit and coat combinations also had a level of lavish elaboration usually reserved for haute eveningwear. Fur-fringed embroideries and ice jewelry conspired to create intensely worked ruffled and beaded silhouettes that glinted with rock-crystal neckpieces and fistfuls of rings. Somewhere in there, a flash of translucent silver seemed to be a clutch in which the quilting of the CC classic bag had been frozen into the likeness of a refrigerator ice cube tray.It was a lucky stroke that the weather outside had kindly assisted Chanel in whipping subzero winds around the Grand Palais while this display was going on. Since humans are suggestible, it took only the merest suspension of disbelief to imagine this collection hitting the mark next fall, despite the fact that it will start to be delivered in July—and who knows in which century we'll have another winter like this one? Nevertheless, putting global warming and the melting of ice caps both center stage and on the back burner (as it were), this show swept the audience along as they were treated to such amusements as seeing Karl Lagerfeld's favorite, Baptiste Giabiconi, swagger out of an ice cave in a full-length polar bear coat.It wasn't all played for laughs. Within the context of a season of innovative knitwear, Chanel's was some of the most outstanding. A group of three short angora sweater dresses, tinted iceberg blue in the center, was an amazing follow-up from something Lagerfeld did with dégradé pastel embroidery in couture. One gray and black cardigan coat was knitted in a bubbly grid to mimic a down-filled puffer.
And the finale was given to a wedding dress knitted in silk tulle ribbon to resemble Chanel's bouclé tweed, forming a tight-fitting sweater in the body and then sweeping away in flounces in back. The bride—Freja, again—dangled an ice-block purse on a fur-woven Chanel chain.
8 March 2010
It didn't exactly come to Karl Lagerfeld in a vision—more of "an electronic flash in my head at five o'clock one morning. Silver and pastel," he said. "It's the first time in my whole career I've done a collection without black or navy. There's not one gold button."From the heart-shaped cartoonish hair to the rococo-heeled silver booties, the show was a mix of romanticism, space age, and incredible eye-tricking handwork—as hard to fix in one place as the mercury that seemed to be running through the seams. The clothes ranged from shorts suits to shifts, from frothy, cocooning bubbles to liquid togas. In some places, the embroideries looked like smashed glass or molten metal; in others, jewelry itself became part of the structure: A halter dress was suspended from a crystal choker, and a shoulder strap became almost indistinguishable from a diamond necklace.How to define it, though? Someone backstage suggested futurism. "I hate that," Lagerfeld shot back. "I don't believe in avant-garde clothes for a future that will never happen. Fashion is always now."To fully describe a single technique—say, the horizontal bands of mille-feuille chiffon frills, minutely frayed at the edges, each layer hand-tinted in a dégradé way so that they almost look like fur from a few paces—requires an essay, not one of the sound bites Lagerfeld's so adept at tossing out. Chanel now produces six shows a year, and since last October, Lagerfeld has run from beige-y rustic ready-to-wear to khaki and red chinoiserie in Shanghai to this latest declaration that gold is out, silver in—and on with the iced fondants.If it's hard to keep up, it's a method that certainly works in favor of couture customers, who would rather not buy anything that could be confused with clothes found hanging in a boutique. In its multifarious ways, this fleeting fantasia of prettiness—which in practice takes thousands of craftsperson hours to realize—fulfills that brief. While Karl Lagerfeld hurtles onward into the constant now.
25 January 2010
How often does a city actually play a leading role in a fashion show? It happened tonight in Shanghai, where the spectacular twenty-first-century skyline and teeming waterfront—complete with kaleidoscopic neon,Jetsons-meets-Blade Runnertowers, improbable glittering disco-ball telecommunications installations, and fast-moving pleasure boats, barges, and tugs—became the live, moving backdrop to Chanel's Paris-Shanghai pre-fall runway. As a thousand guests sat on a darkened pontoon moored in the Huangpu River, models ranged to and fro in front of a translucent wall, so the speedy, dirty, visually thrilling urban nightscape became, as Karl Lagerfeld put it, "the set."The designer played the collection fast and loose, a multidimensional fantasia that dipped deeply into Shanghai's louche past as the Paris of the East. Clothes-wise it involved glancing references to Chinese sartorial history, from the terra-cotta army through cheongsams, Mandarin split-sided Qipao gowns, deep lacquer-red embellishments and silk linings, Mongolian tapestry boots and shaggy furs, and spins on Communist Mao suits and comrade caps.Did Gabrielle Chanel ever set foot in the gambling parlors; opium dens; and shady, glamorous nightclubs of twenties and thirties Shanghai? Well, no. The collection yielded covetable gilded embroidery in the form of a Chinese cabinet on a windowpane tweed suit, camellias carved into the surfaces of black leather leggings, and a military quilted vest, but the elaborate justification for this latest flex of Chanel's corporate muscle was a Lagerfeld-directed movie,Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy, starring the designer's inner-circle favorites. Amanda Harlech impersonated the Duchess of Windsor, and Freja Beha Erichsen and Baptiste Giabiconi played a pair of young Communists, while the convincing Coco look-alike Jane Schmitt dreamed her way from an afternoon nap in her chinoiserie-decorated Rue Cambon apartment through various sequences in Old Shanghai—not forgetting an encounter with Marlene Dietrich on the way.Tongue-in-cheek it may have been—Mademoiselle's love of chinoiserie allegedly went so deep that, among other things, she based the design of her bag on Chinese quilting. Who knew? But the film elicited much good-humored laughter from the crowd of Shanghainese beautiful people before everyone migrated across the road for a vast cabaret party at the recently restored Deco Peninsula Hotel.
The point—other than a platform for the workmanship of the house's specialist craftspeople in its Métiers d'Art, and an outlet for Lagerfeld's interest in filmmaking? A giant social power play for the eminence of brand Chanel in China, of course. To judge by the young, exquisitely dressed women outfitted top to toe in Chanel in the audience, this market, if not quite as booming as it was two years ago, is visibly open to more expansion where a trusted CC investment is concerned. Chanel just opened a store on the Bund opposite the show venue, and it's been packed with people all week—including, at peak times, several couples occupying the jewelry department, looking bent on acquisition.
2 December 2009
Chanel was up at cockcrow for a gigantic fashion romp in the hay. A huge barn had been conjured up in the center of the Grand Palais, and the models emerged from it, wheat ears clinging to their tousled blond Bardot beehives, straw stuck to their clothes, and a little smirk and stagger in their step as if just caught out at you-know-what. Naughty, naughty! Between them, the Chanel country coquettes managed to flirt their way around every rustic reference in Karl Lagerfeld's extensive repertoire of craft-y couture skills, from hopsack to basket weave and cane work to aprons, dirndls, peasant-y poppy prints, and fantastic wooden double-C clogs. It was a bumper harvest of everything that is chicly tattered, beribboned, and gloriously made about Chanel, as well as the season's sole experience to make the anxiety and earnestness around fashion evaporate, to make it seem like fantastic fun again.Never mind the hay, Lagerfeld was on a roll. Digging into a theme can sometimes throw up some embarrassing puns, and the effort to be youthful has occasionally had off-beam results at Chanel. But with this collection, Lagerfeld's summing up of the season's tendencies—beige, ivory, and black; rough textures; transparency and lace—was spun into a collection so masterfully balanced between classicism and current fashion affairs that the whole thing felt delightfully sure-footed. The knack was that he didn't rush it—just let the thing keep bouncing out in a sustained variation of caramels, taupes, and ecrus, all logically adapted to the house's nubby tweed suits, frothy blouses, and fluttery chiffons. The editing of everything to short lengths looked sweet without being chichi—the test being that every teenage girl looked naturally at home in the little thigh-split skirts (that's what has happened to the bottom half of the Chanel suit), as well as in the mini-crinis and ruffled dance dresses.Prince and Rihanna were competing for attention in the front row; there was a surprise turn from Lily Allen, who rose out of the floor on a hoedown platform to belt out a saltily worded country number; and at the end, Freja Beha Erichsen, Lara Stone, and Lagerfeld's constant companion, Baptiste Giabiconi, were literally rolling around in the hay together. And yet, remarkably, the clothes never became a sideshow. In a season when celebrities, concepts, and a lot of forgettable mediocrity have got in the way of seeing why luxury fashion should merit the price, this was a Chanel triumph.
5 October 2009
Before rating Chanel's Fall couture, let's consider what Karl Lagerfeld has already done for the house in the last six months. There was the indelible, incredible high of his all-white couture show in January. Then, a matter of weeks ago, the staging of an unforgettably glamorous Resort collection on the beach at the Venice Lido. All this supremely heart-lifting fashion, delivered in a year that is technically the most depressing in living memory.Back in Paris again, was it going to be humanly possible to top that for a third time? As it turned out, not quite. The Chanel couture for Fall, shown in the Grand Palais on a stage set with giant white N° 5 bottles, had a comparatively toned-down atmosphere. Lagerfeld's single conceit was a play on graphic proportion—suits and dresses with a longer flyaway panel in the back, all shown with lace tights and stiletto-heeled booties. As the show progressed, he offered up some remarkable looks: a "smoking" redingote with a ruffle-necked blouse; a crinolined dance dress; pretty, light chiffon dresses in nude or midnight blue with ruffled trains. The outstanding look, though, was the one where the panel device was the least evident: a superchic spiral-cut dark blue dress with an asymmetric "tail" lined in red. All the Chanel craftsmanship was there, of course, and impeccably achieved. For all that, Lagerfeld didn't manage to outstrip the genius of those previous two shows. That's the annoying thing when you're competing against yourself.
6 July 2009
A cruise show on a boardwalk snaking along the Venice Lido with the sun about to set, gentle waves rolling in, and a whisper of a breeze to make sinuous shapes flutter in movement…it couldn't have been a more poetic or, given the times, more uniquely audacious Chanel moment. "I wanted to reinvent the mystique," said Karl Lagerfeld, talking about locating the collection in one of Coco Chanel's favorite summer haunts—she visited Venice for almost ten years beginning in 1919 and met Diaghilev here. But Lagerfeld might also have been speaking about reinstating the long-lost leisurely sensation of a fashion show as an exceptional one-off experience. The 350 guests reclining on sun beds in the famous white tented cabanas certainly felt privileged to be witnessing the extreme glamour of the designer's learned-but-light invocation of an important part of Coco Chanel's biography, one that was overlaid with passing allusions to Visconti, Fellini, the Venice carnival, and the city's art treasures."Coco on the Lido," as Lagerfeld called it, started with a tableau of figures in tricorne hats and cloaks—cover-ups for a play on girdles and bras as bathing suits. Next came Tatjana Patitz promenading in creamy lace as the picture-hatted Edwardian mother inDeath in Venice, her sailor-suited son Tadzio and his two sisters in ingenue fan-pleated dresses trailing behind. From there, the sequence took off into matelot- and gondolier-inspired stripes, interpreted in long-line fine-knit cardigans and playful beachwear with funny red and white striped wedge booties. The references kept streaming out—a halterneck dress fashioned in plissé knit to suggest Fortuny, the deep Doge red and the golden lion motif of the city flag, shimmery sequins and glass embroidery made to imitate the light of Venice glancing off water.But for all that, not to mention the silent-movie hair and makeup that strung it together, the show avoided too slavish a narrative. There were moments of silliness as well: The Chanel sunglasses recast as Venetian masquerade lorgnettes and the flashes of eroticism in the exposed corsetry spelled fun for the novelty-seeker. But the star pieces here were pure Chanel, un-themed save for their classic elegance: a long black column with a sexily tied narrow trailing scarf, a cream sequin-edged matching jacket and dress, and the unmistakable frothy silk blouses of the rue Cambon.
In spite of all his extensive erudition on the art, culture, and personalities of the Venetian past, Lagerfeld concluded, "I don't use it to make costume. I was actually more interested in the café society of the thirties and the life Chanel lived here, which is gone now." True, but as guests wend their ways home after two days of roaming the museums, churches, bars, restaurants, and nightclubs of Venice, they're returning with tales of a happening few would believe could really take place in 2009.
13 May 2009
In a season when coat-dresses and skirtsuits have risen to somewhere near the top of the item charts, Chanel presented a series of fashion's most poised and charming versions. That formula transmitted some of the loveliness of Karl Lagerfeld's sublime origami-paper Spring Couture collection into super-feminine white collar and cuff treatments—frothy plissé ruffs, chiffon camellias, and French maid frills encircled the neck or sleeves on soft, fitted black silhouettes. Cleverly, today's outing also achieved a rare balance between being grown-up and youthful—a note set by the casting of Karen Elson to open the show. Here was a fabulous-looking 30-year-old woman, rather than some anonymous waif.Lagerfeld tagged the collection "Belle Brummell," a gender-reassigned quip referring to the British Regency dandy who dictated men's fashion by tying his cravats in ever more elaborate configurations. The pun also gave full permission to bring the classic Chanel white georgette blouse into play, a perfect device for subtracting the austerity from black in a distinctly Rue Cambon manner. Lagerfeld worked it every which way, in bouclé, lace, knit, satin, and paillettes, while also making a witty swerve in the direction of the season's motorcycle leathers (interpreted here in slim drop-waist dresses) and puffer jackets.What color there was turned up in brief passages of pale green or baby pink. Admittedly, that green wasn't the most felicitous shade in the palette for clothing, but it was really there to underline the presence of the jade Deco-style pendants and neckpieces—a further echo of which could be found in the jade rings implanted in several pairs of heels. All in all, though, this wasn't one of Chanel's more playful simultaneous broadcasts to the world—more a serious reinforcement of the brand's eternal attractions.
9 March 2009
The room was all white, with every pillar deeply garlanded in giant paper flowers, tables covered with laser-cut paper cloths, and the staircase laden with yet more cutout roses and camellias. As the girls started to descend in pristine, precision-cut silhouettes, heads decorated with exquisite paper-flower tiara constructions, it was clear this was going to be a Chanel moment to treasure.In splendid defiance of the darkness of the time, Karl Lagerfeld said he'd cleared everything away and "started with a clean sheet of paper." An all-white collection sounds like an exercise in clinical minimalism, but it wasn't. It was rather like an uplifting rite of spring, perfectly pitched between graphic modernism, ravishing romance, and astonishingly innovative detail.From a distance, the collection was disciplined into simple planes, the silhouettes cut in an A-line tapering upward to meet cropped jackets with flat, squared-off shoulders and standaway collars. Close up, though, the minutiae became mind-spinning. The classic Chanel braid was minimized to millimeters of handwoven fluff and the embroidered flowers modernized in weightless 3-D montages of organza and cellophane. The paillettes were microdots of matte plastic, and the lace shivered with tiny crystalline beads.Key to the show's success was the involvement of Kamo, a Japanese hairdresser and Lagerfeld discovery whose team scored and scissored out—while sitting on the floor of a Chanel backroom—the incredible constructs of paper roses, camellias, leaf fronds, and feathers that adorned each girl. Photos of elaborate eighteenth-century white porcelain figures pinned to the studio wall were another source of inspiration. But research can only take you so far: The real genius is in the transformation that takes place in the making, a result of the Chanel workers' ability to push their craft to points of innovation never quite seen before. That, and Lagerfeld's deft tempering of extravagance with a sense of freshness and restraint, made this fragile collection one of the strongest arguments for the value of haute couture in the whole of Paris.
26 January 2009
Ruby red lacquered bags like Fabergé eggs swinging from gilded chains, heels sculpted like upturned onion domes, hair-and-pearl-adorned tiaras like those of Byzantine empresses—oh, and strict black Soviet "uniform" suits. Yes, this was Karl Lagerfeld setting off on another of his light but learned excursions into Coco Chanel's exotic history with men: in this case, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and the Russian inspirations—the Ballets Russes, Constructivism, Byzantine jewelry, and Slavic folklore—triggered by their relationship."Paris-Moscou" was Lagerfeld's theme for the semiannual collection designed to show off the skills of the French embroiderers, milliners, goldsmiths, and shoemakers the house supports. And it was also the subject of his directorial debut. As the audience—which included Princess Caroline of Monaco, Diane Kruger, Emmanuelle Béart, and Clémence Poésy—took its seats in the plush velvet and mahogany Théâtre le Ranelagh, the show opened with a silent black-and-white cine-skit on Coco's flirtation with Russian-Parisian émigré society in the 1910's and 1920's, featuring a cast of Lagerfeld's friends. (The short film is now playing on www.chanel.com.)Fashion-wise, the then-now parallels were embodied by the Russian models, led out by Sasha Pivovarova. The clothes—extravagantly embellished with sequins and pearls, tufted layers of chiffon, and sparkling feather fringe—were accessorized with a winter fantasia of military fur hats, gold Cossack boots, and pseudo-revolutionary badges, as well as a smattering of very 2008 leather leggings. If today's oligarchettes are still in the market for super-spending, there'll be plenty here to keep the rubles flowing. And for anyone with a yearning to buy in a different way, here's another thought: The goody bag guests took away contained Cuir de Russie (the classic scent Chanel devised with Ernest Beaux, the czar's perfumer, in 1927) and the new Chanel nail color release—the deep blue, iridescent Nuit de Russie.
2 December 2008
Since it's not exactly feasible to invite people to view a Chanel collection in-house, as it used to be done, Karl Lagerfeld instead decided to bring the Rue Cambon to the thousand or so people who crowded into the Grand Palais. A life-size facade of the storied Chanel building at number 31—complete with a street runway—had been dropped into the space. The doors opened, "Our House" by Madness struck up on the sound system, and a line of Chanel-clad pedestrians streamed out.It was a charming, expensive shot of celebratory fun rolled out with supreme confidence. Lagerfeld said the theme was inspired by a grayish portrait by Marie Laurencin, who painted Coco Chanel in the twenties, but really, it was yet another of his long, allusive, sometimes mischievous excursions around the house set pieces. The fact that there's an untainted core to this label—the tweeds, bows, camellias, and ineffably pretty cocktailwear—means Lagerfeld can take full license to nod to all sides of the road. So, within a relatively tight palette of black, white, and gray, he made free with current references to graphic checks (done in a painterly way on sleeveless suits), metallics and sheerness (in tissue-fine silvery pink lamé and crunchy, sparkly paillette embroideries), and lingerie notes (a bit of boudoir styling in marabou-heeled shoes and frilled negligee sleeves).This, however, is far from an adequate précis of the multifaceted Chanel action on the runway. It encompassed jumpsuits and Empire gowns, flamenco-cum-western ruffled skirts, black ciré swimwear, and, in the middle of it all, a kitsch skit on the Chanel carrier bag: little shopping bags in pink leather. In the end, though, it was the delicious eveningwear that carried the show to a lovely conclusion: long, narrow skirtsuits with cropped boleros, a pink vertically pleated dress, and, yes, even a gray-tinted cloudy georgette flowing dress that could have sat for Marie Laurencin.
2 October 2008
When showing in the Grand Palais—a soaring dome of a space capable of dwarfing an enormous audience and miniaturizing any runway—Karl Lagerfeld needs to exaggerate to make his theme carry. Thus, a 50-foot set is craned in to announce the season's keynote: in this case, a vast multilevel stack of steel-gray tubes, suggesting organ pipes.What proceeded, inevitably enough, was a virtuoso fugue in tubular cutting, played up, down, and across every possible scale in Chanel's suiting, embroideries, chiffon, and eveningwear. From the beginning, the clothes took on curvilinear volumes, starting with gray-flecked, cocoonlike car coats over short skirts and trompe l'oeil tweed "suits" with belled skirts, which on closer inspection were actually one-piece coat-dresses. Lagerfeld's irrepressible facility for quick-fire free association in design ideas led to dozens of three-dimensional devices thereafter: huge bunchy cap sleeves, cartridge rolls of material encircling waists or hobbling hemlines, deep scrolls of fabric standing out from skirts, and spaghettilike fringing flying from shoulders.The general impression was of a collection that had changed key from last season's girlishness to something tuned more to a winter-weight, grown-up frequency. Still, the delight was all in the more light-fingered treatments: delicate fronds of ostrich fringe on a micro-beaded suit, or silvery zigzag embroidery on an intensely sequined belted dress. Couture at this supreme level only gets more incredible the closer you get to it. The frustration is that, paraded at such a distance, the astonishing skill involved in creating these effects is incapable of being picked up by the naked eye. There is, of course, a sense of occasion and anticipation in being invited to sit in the Chanel grandstand, but the genius of Karl Lagerfeld and the unique ateliers of the Rue Cambon might be far better appreciated in close-up.
30 June 2008
After taking to the skies for the flight-themed Resort collection he presented in Los Angeles a year ago, Karl Lagerfeld made a splashy landing with the new Chanel Cruise show. His models literally walked on water on a curvilinear runway built over the famously sinuous pool at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach, Miami. If Zoë Kravitz was nervous that they might misstep and fall in, Sasha Pivovarova—who opened and closed the show—said resolutely that she never entertained the thought."Everyone associates Miami with the Raleigh's kind of [Deco] glamour," Diane Kruger (in a navy satin minidress and straw hat worn tilted back on her head) said after the show. And the closing performance, featuring the United States synchronized-swimming team, would have made Esther Williams (who once swam in this pool) proud. The clothes themselves, though, nodded to an entirely different era. The 74-look collection mixed rock 'n' roll with seventies swing and high glamour, all rendered with Lagerfeld's forward-minded attitude.Models with Brian Jones-inspired hair looked as smart in smokings as they did in seventies-style full-legged light-wash jeans, tie-dyed logo tees, and haute hippie headbands. These are sure to be in high demand among the easy-living types who make the rounds of tony beachside resorts, but it wasn't all just sun and fun. A series of elaborately beaded dresses with clear or smoky plastic insets were examples of pure urban sophistication, just as the few goddess dresses were exemplars of restraint. The pistol-heeled shoes—pagingCharlie's Angels—were a different story. Lagerfeld's own wardrobe might have influenced the hard-edged looks (silver sequined blazers and black jeans) that the models rocked near the close of a show that was a spectacular in every way. "This kind of production speaks to the importance of the [Resort] market and signals how commercially viable it is," said Saks' Ron Frasch. Perhaps only Lagerfeld, though, can make the whole enterprise seem like so much fun.
14 May 2008
A Chanel carousel fitted out with giant quilted bags, camellias, pearls, boaters, and bows faced the audience as it poured into the Grand Palais for the Fall Ready-to-wear show. It was a fitting metaphor for the timeless turning of the house classics, and for the unstoppable machine fashion has become these days. The instinct, on arrival, was to prepare to hold on tight. How fast would this thing be set to whiz? How many blur-speed notions would Karl Lagerfeld manage to whip past us this time?Thankfully, instead of the past few seasons' bamboozling surges of styles, all that transpired was that the girls walked in a circle, then climbed aboard the turning merry-go-round so that the clothes could be viewed again at leisure. It was worth a second and third look because this was a collection that, in spite of its something-Chanel-for-everyone variety, also provided gimmick-free commentary on current trends. Lagerfeld didn¿t miss a trick, from fragile, frothy, high-necked blouses to spidery knits, peplum jackets, and an intelligent exploration of how longer lengths might be worked into a winter wardrobe. It could be as a tweed maxi column skirt with a delicate blouse (the literal version), but also as a long, cutaway ostrich-trimmed coat over a short skirt (newer and cooler). And what of austerity chic, the subject du jour? Lagerfeld's witty take was an updated retread of Coco Chanel's "poverty de luxe," so that the tweed suits came with worn-through elbows or scatterings of faux-darned patches. Nothing too heavy, of course, because Lagerfeld is not one to take passing fashion issues, even recession, too seriously. But in its relative restraint, reserved color, and holding back on accessory overload, this collection was a smart way to prove that whatever goes around comes around, and ends up looking just as Chanel as ever.
28 February 2008
When guests filed into the Grand Palais, they were greeted by the sight of a giant monument to the Chanel jacket, apparently cast in concrete. The message? The immutability of the brand—perhaps not a bad statement in a week when the search for rock-solid future investments is, to put it mildly, playing on people's minds.In Karl Lagerfeld's hands, the Chanel couture jacket is an infinitely malleable treasure, always current yet timelessly valuable. This collection reiterated that magical strength to the max, with lyrical plays on the little tweed classic. It was cut in neat shapes, as riding jackets, in puffy-sleeved romantic satin, or as coat-dresses with angled hems, and often fastened with huge bejeweled brooches (a strong trend in Paris). But Lagerfeld also raised questions about the end uses of couture now. By sending out each girl in a pair of ballet flats, hair decorated with ingenue tiaralike Alice bands, and keeping the lengths resolutely short, he pitched the Chanel image toward lightness, freshness, and the young customer he sees emerging in new markets.Partly inspired by the spiraling forms and delicate colors of shells, the skirts and dresses came draped, twisted, and inserted with edgings of feather and flashes of metallic embellishment. Together, they built toward some breathtaking moments: a fondant-pink suit veiled in cream tulle, a raw-edged midnight-blue chiffon cocktail dress, a black bustier dress with gold glinting from the inside of its looped-up skirts, a creamy tiered dress made entirely from plumes. All these pristine examples of technique and imagination (and there were many more) combined to lift the audience to that special place of "How did they do that?" wonderment Chanel alone can provide. The only letdown? Something in the performance. It's not necessarily a Chanel-specific problem, but today's very young, thin, unformed models lack the personality needed to bring the joy of couture fully to life.
21 January 2008
Possibly the most glamorous tourists ever to hit London—Karl Lagerfeld and the Chanel posse—arrived in town this week in a flurry of flashbulbs to present the house's Métiers d'Art pre-fall collection over a two-day razzle-dazzle round of cocktails, dinners, and partying. Why? It's the right time and the right place to bring out a super-special collection, sandwiched in a sweet new spot of luxury between ready-to-wear and haute couture. As Lagerfeld explained it, "There's a new clientele now, Russian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, South American, and they're young and they're all tiny—size 36, 38. They have no problem fitting into standard sizes." And many of them (thanks to Gordon Brown's favorable tax laws) happen to be discreetly domiciled in the U.K. capital, perchance on the lookout for something just a little more gorgeous to wear on London's now extremely dressed-up social circuit.Voilà: Métiers d'Art, the collection conceived to give creative vent to the decorative arts of the specialist embroidery, costume jewelry, millinery, feather-making, silversmithing, and boot-making ateliers Chanel acquired in 2002. The resulting show, staged at Phillips de Pury in Victoria, loosely played as a time-traversing game of English/French translations centered on the backstory of Coco Chanel's relationships with Arthur "Boy" Capel and the Duke of Westminster. Those dalliances cemented her abiding love of tweed, sailor stripes, cashmere knits, and—thanks to the indulgent Duke—gigantic love jewels, worn in rule-breaking multiples. Brought up-to-date, the look involves towering beehives and Amy Winehouse-meets-Daphne Guinness eyeliner, tweed coats with edges apparently tattered but actually detailed with rills of chiffon and feather, a chubby made of ostrich plumes, bejeweled redingotes, chiffon zippered armlets, gilded shearling leather, and layered cashmere—all finished here and there with brooch-studded gauntlets and flat, pointy loafers with a chunk of sparkle on the toe. Emma Watson, Rinko Kikuchi, Natalia Vodianova, Charlotte Casiraghi, Thandie Newton, and the very British Lilys, Allen and Cole, drank it all in as Irina Lazareanu belted out the backing music. Afterward, they headed off to Amy Sacco's Bungalow 8 outpost at St. Martins Lane hotel.See photos from the pre-fall dinner at Nobu >
6 December 2007
Nuits d'Été, it was called, which gave some clue to at least a few of the dozen or so things that were going on at Chanel.Summer Nights,Grease, fifties Americana? Maybe that would explain the opening of blue-jean everything, from jackets to trenches, wide-leg jeans to dungarees, and, yes, bathing costumes—and then the parade of star prints and red-and-white striped jackets, and the Ronettes singingBe My Babyin the background. Really, though, it looked more as if Karl Lagerfeld had set off with a cry of "Let's see how many trends of the season we can tick off this time."So, apart from the fifties, and the stripes and the stars (which have been shown elsewhere, but not in the flag sense), Lagerfeld checked off transparency, in the bottom half of organza evening looks; ran exhaustively through the all-in-one, from overalls to silk pajama types to teddies; and also touched on masculine-feminine tailoring, the big shoulder (with a new side-loaded epaulette), ballerina lengths, gold—oh, and soft, thirties circle cutting (actually, he was the first with that one, over at Fendi).In other words, it was the regular Chanel ready-to-wear tsunami of style, strewn with a plethora of surface devices like grommets and portholes (in a bag) and loaded with pearls, chains, bows, bangles, buttons, and star-strung jewelry. Though it teetered on the brink of that other Parisian trend, randomness (the one Rei Kawakubo brought up at Comme), Lagerfeld kept the Chanel classics bobbing along on the surface as a lifeline to the elegance-seekers of the world. Some of the jackets—like the multilayered white chiffon—and the simple fitted dresses, with flattering circles of paillettes in the flanks, had the true stamp of the investment about them—the sort of dateless things that transcend any transient trend.
4 October 2007
From his lofty position at the ultimate heights of fashion, Karl Lagerfeld can still deliver a lesson in what makes a brilliant collection: clarity and intense follow-through. Put simply, he looked at Chanel from one angle—sideways-on—and turned that technical exercise into a show that focused all the imaginative, structural, and decorative skills of haute couture into one idea: tracing the body line from shoulder to ankle. "High profile," he called it. "Everything is flat at the front. It¿s all side effects."The concept gave a linear dynamic to clothes that employed every conceivable device for piling interest into the place where side seams ought to be. In the opening series of narrow, tuniclike coat-dresses, Lagerfeld used strips of leather, moving into feather and bold tracings of pearl. Then, as he progressed into evening, there were glimpses of sequined embroidery or rills of georgette fluttering from the sides of numerous black lace, ribbon, and chiffon dresses. Tailored hunting jackets with flying peplums in back contributed to the overall sense of forward motion, as did the finale gowns, some trailing airborne capes in their wake. All this was underscored by the image of impossibly elongated women on the move, striding along in leather leggings, heads clad in abstracted hoods or futuristic feathered earmuffs.Even the drenching weather—the show took place under canopies pitched in the Parc de Saint Cloud—couldn't dampen the energy, exquisiteness, and coherence of this collection. After nearly 20 years at Chanel, Lagerfeld has nothing left to prove, but his power to surprise and modernize is still a phenomenal sight to behold.
2 July 2007
The spectacle Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel staged on Friday night at a Los Angeles airfield was so audacious, so over-the-top, it elicited a standing ovation before the first model hit the people mover. The designer, who took over Grand Central station in New York last May and commandeered a fleet of buses in Paris the year before that, chose a Santa Monica plane hangar for this year's resort extravaganza. He had it decorated like an exclusive airport lounge complete with three cocktail bars, personalized flight bags on each and every seat, and arrival and departure screens listing "Chanel Line" flights. It was on those screens that celebrity guests like Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Diane Kruger, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen first caught sight of not one, but two, Challenger 601 jets approaching the runway. "I love it!" exclaimed Angie Harmon, jumping up from her seat, as the models spilled out of the planes in their first looks."Airports and flying have become a nightmare," Lagerfeld had said backstage a few minutes earlier. "L.A. is about the dream of private jets and beautiful cars and glamour. Cruise collections are about the dream of freedom." To open the show, he sent Raquel Zimmermann out in a navy jumpsuit with stripes at the cuffs. A cross between a captain's uniform and a first-class passenger's travel outfit, it had a kind of jet-set practicality—a mix of sportif and utilitarian that carried through to other looks, including a ribbed knit tunic dress, a sequin baseball jacket worn with skinny jeans and a matching cap, and a cargo skirt topped by the familiar Chanel tweed jacket in army green. "I love that he used a lot of color," said Camilla Belle, "especially the salmon pink."All-out glamour came in the form of black cutout dresses worn over pleated blush-colored silk shifts; narrow satin tunics belted over longer skirts in a style reminiscent of Poiret; piles of accessories (from colorful plastic headbands to quilted bags that glistened like ice to cap-toe clear plastic ankle boots); and a pair of his-and-her robes. "The sequin dressing gowns were genius," said L.A. transplant Victoria Beckham, in vintage Chanel. "Fashion has come to Hollywood. He's paved the way for many more designers, I hope." Maybe so, but the peripatetic Lagerfeld said he's already dreaming about Monte Carlo for his next resort show. He's done planes, trains, and buses, after all. Yachts may be next.
20 May 2007
Karl Lagerfeld has made a habit of turning his Chanel resort shows into spectacles. Last year, he loaded editors and retailers onto Paris buses, then paraded the models in and out at scheduled stops. On Wednesday, he continued the transportation theme, taking over Grand Central Terminal's Metrazur restaurant, and in the process, he gave Metro North riders the daily commute of their lives: Mischa Barton, Naomi Watts, Julianne Moore, and Maria Bello all made their way into the storied New York City train station.As for the clothes, this was no couture extravaganza, but Lagerfeld hardly skimped on the details: Thin strings replaced button closures on jackets and coats, leather bomber dresses were backed with more-forgiving tweed, and black chiffon cocktail numbers came embroidered with Mademoiselle's beloved chain links. The collection included trusty Chanel hits—the lace twinset in dramatic black and demure cream, bouclé tweed suits shot with crystals or trailing silk streamers—as well as a few surprises. In a nod to the all-American venue, perhaps, he included wide-leg denim dungarees and a logo print that evoked subway-car graffiti.All 58 looks were accessorized to the hilt; models sported armloads of bangles, shoulder-duster earrings, and ribbons in their hair. Knee-high gladiator sandals (worn with matching gauntlets) replaced fall's spectator boots, and Lagerfeld found an ingenious application for the house's signature quilting motif—a pattern on wedge heels. But it was the location that was truly inspired; where will he go next?
16 May 2006
There were an ice rink, banks of snow, and, up above, a suspended skyscape of tulle clouds, gently puffing vapor into the atmosphere under the glass dome of the Grand Palais. Welcome to Chanel, where Karl Lagerfeld picked up on the idea of cold-weather college-girl styling that's emerging as a Parisian subtheme. How can "random" and casual work for one of the great establishment names of the City of Light? Lagerfeld approached it by turning the house bouclé tweeds into colorful checks, punching them up with magenta and turquoise, and adding a load of bobbly crochet, striped sock hats, sequined rugby vests, stacks of plastic geometric cuffs, and shiny breastplate necklaces.Since Coco Chanel co-opted Tyrolean felted jackets as one of the inspirations for her classic genre, there was a vague link between the past and Lagerfeld's references to, say, snowboarding and skiwear—like the puffer-sleeved tweed with a cowl hoodie and narrow fur skirt, shaved to look like corduroy. A sense of all this is going on in fashion at large, and it wasn't a bad device for loosening things up at a time when "ladylike" is feeling distinctly over. Still, though Lagerfeld proved yet again that he is a canny barometer of every change in the fashion atmosphere, he's eternally careful not to lose sight of the fact that Chanel is for a woman who essentially wants to feel put-together and dainty. Example: She might now want to wear one of Chanel's standard creamy blouses untucked, with a rugby-striped sequin vest over a pair of skinny pants, or make an impeccable black shift look futuristic with a flash of beige patent in the neckline. By evening, in any case, Lagerfeld had cleared the way for a plain view of little black dresses, now with draped shoulder lines, bows, and flyaway trails that looked light and lovely in movement. For the faithful, that was just enough youthfulness to keep the appeal of Chanel feeling perfectly current, even if, as a whole, this didn't quite come up to the level of one of Lagerfeld's blockbusters.
1 March 2007
The genius of Karl Lagerfeld is his way of whacking a topical spin into every couture collection without ever compromising the ineffable core of Chanel. This time, he had a phalanx of men roll out a giant double-C rug, and struck up the band—Cat Power, who laid into some punked-up Stones and Smokey Robinson classics. So it was with the opening volley of clothes—sixties-but-modern supershort coat-dresses and even more abbreviated jackets, all striding out on a base of leggy black tights.His ability to compress variety into those rigorously tiny, neat silhouettes was something to behold. There was a black one with patent collar, cuffs, and pocket flaps. A navy military pea coat had bandbox-smart striped edgings. Yet more toppers with delicious sproutings of feathers or fragile tulle bows followed, until out came a gorgeous little raggedy-edged dress with a tight waist and puffed-out skirt.Any other designer might have been satisfied to stop there, but Lagerfeld had evening to deal with. There, he changed gear, flipping between pristine military mess jackets over long, sheer-net skirts and silvery sequined streaks of vertical ribbon, let loose in the hem to whip around, car wash-style. If that gave a more random feel to the show¿s second half, well, it also succeeded in covering all occasions (and age requirements). To produce a show of this vast range and handiwork takes an army. To that point, Lagerfeld had a nice finale up his sleeve. At the end, a curtain drew back to reveal the massed Chanel workers: models, atelier staff, studio designers, and house ambassador Amanda Harlech, who all followed Lagerfeld out to share the applause.
22 January 2007
With perfect pitch, Karl Lagerfeld dashed off yet another virtuoso demonstration of how to play up and down the classic Chanel scale in tune with any season. It was up-tempo, light and girly, with a cute opening device: a bouncy parade of girls in standard-issue white cotton cabine coats swinging along, attracting all attention to stacks of gold cuffs, link bracelets, chain-and-pearl necklaces, and plastic-Lucite-and-glitter wedges and platforms.The segue into the short, A-line, and fluttery was carried off, sans effort, via breezy white flared tops over little black skirts, with a trill on the abbreviated white tucked-front shirtdress, and a high-note from a gold-quilted chain bag. Then the clever bit: What on earth to do with the old, potentially heavy-wash-cloth Chanel tweeds in such a mood? Why, put them with black sequin short shorts—thus chiming with the leggy forties showgirl theme of the moment—and shoot sparkle through the borders of the bouclé.Instead of the multitudinous flocks of options he has sent out in the last few seasons, this single-file presentational march condensed everything that can be thoroughly Chanel, yet completely du jour. While he was at it, Lagerfeld also dashed off sporty striped T-shirt dresses, tulle-covered denim, Edie Sedgwick, metallic-scuba, and puffy Empire organza moments, but mostly it was all about those newly wantable accessories. Black leather quilted mini bags, smothered with biker-like metal logo badges, were the final ta-da. In other words, a hit.
5 October 2006
With his sharp knack for synthesizing the mood of the moment into the spirit of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld came up with a couture statement that might neatly be labeled "mod medieval." In a short, leggy collection shown entirely with thigh-high boots, some in distressed denim, he compressed a tough vibe into a sequence of abbreviated suits and tunic dresses marched out at high speed around a stark-white runway.The skinny-leg device showcased Lagerfeld's deft handling of new proportions. It started with a narrow, molded shoulder line falling to dresses with a slight flare in the hem, or to short, belled skirts articulated to swing underneath tweed jackets. One outstanding cardinal-red duchesse-satin coat with a huge bubble collar was a succinct reply to the vexed refrain of whether volume can be truly desirable—no question, if it looks that gorgeous.Still, for all the rigor of line, there was rich Chanel craftsmanship in every piece. Jeweled buttons and belts, embroideries of exploding stars, pearl and diamond hair decorations, dense patches of appliqué and stones, and smotherings of black satin bows conspired to give a fleeting impression of armor and heraldic pageantry—that's where the sense of futuristic medievalism came into play. It all passed at such relentless velocity, though, the details were difficult to catch, at least until the very last moment. When the girls finally stood still, the audience, watching from seats on a central dais, suddenly found itself revolving, carousel-style, at leisure to inspect every look. Great trip, in every sense.
5 July 2006
Karl Lagerfeld's ability to stretch the template of Chanel this way and that according to the moment never ceases. This season, the block-heeled sixties spectator boot he first showed for couture gave him the starting point to design upward into a young and leggy look. Letles autresturn to the omnipresent Balenciaga influence; for Lagerfeld, there's no need to look beyond the Rue Cambon for a reason to make a newly proportioned short tweed suit. Just as it was in the fifties and sixties when Coco competed with Cristobal, now Chanel's slim coats and jackets, worn with ruffled blouses and jewel-buckled belts, represent the authentically sourced Paris alternative to the oft-quoted architectural volumes of Signor B.Though it was mainly black, with touches of white, cream, and dull pink, Lagerfeld's collection didn't come off as one of the season's solemn pronouncements on sobriety and restraint. Instead, he worked texture, sparkle, and girlishness into surfaces and styling: He used satin ribbons and bows for hair bands and bodices, raw edgings on hems, and gemstones and crystals set in big brooches or as bejeweled necklines set into evening dresses. As a contemporary twist on the classic Chanel bag he added an oversize unstructured hand-held tote—something like a laundry bag, but in patent leather, with a short chain handle.As always, the Chanel presentation zipped pell-mell through many options. There were simple sleeveless little black dresses and short redingotes, flared from the waist (the best in plain herringbone tweed). For evening, Lagerfeld checked off more points of the season, from exaggerated puff-sleeves to sixties Edie-ish baby dolls and various renderings of chiffon dresses layered over trousers. Cute and young was the general impression, but—no surprise—Lagerfeld also ensured that classic Chanel's all-encompassing sweep remained firmly in the mind's eye.
2 March 2006
It was pure Chanel, crystallized to a point of perfection only witnessed in haute couture. From the precise, short, molded-waist dresses to the miniscule jackets to the frosted-sugar evening looks, every piece was modern, but also spun entirely from the house's heritage. The cumulative effect was so young and pretty that, by the end, some audience members were literally tearing up at the sight of Lily Cole in a white trapeze dress that melted into an airy train floating and shimmering several feet behind her.Karl Lagerfeld began this mostly black-and-white collection with a new treatment of the Chanel suit. Tiny boleros—some flaring out to a chic angle at the back—and belled skirts drew attention to narrow waists (the fashion zone of the moment). These were paired with flat white go-go boots, which were not referenced from the sixties, but from a pair Coco (always ahead of her time) was wearing in a photograph from the decade before.That allusion and others demonstrate just how deftly Lagerfeld—Chanel historian par excellence—marshals his knowledge. He sprinkles the camellias, the satin bows, the organdy collars, and the bound edges so lightly that they become playful thrills—not belabored underscorings of theme or "brand identity." His tulle petticoated dance dresses and slithery satin sheaths all tie back to lesser-known things Chanel did in the twenties and thirties—but we're not really meant to care. What matters is how Lagerfeld reinvents the house signatures to pique the fantasies of today's young woman—and that he does just beautifully.
23 January 2006
The audience at Chanel's spring presentation was greeted by the sight of a gargantuan computer screen and keyboard, placed at the end of the runway. It seemed like the one unifying symbol of everything Karl Lagerfeld sent out in the collection: all the high-speed information about every trend of the season, communicated directly onto a computer screen in real time. Faster than even Style.com can report it.It was as if the ever-restless Lagerfeld, sitting in his studio at the Rue Cambon, had designed while continually hitting the refresh button on his vision of the global domain of the eternal "CC." What should the new Chanel jacket look like for spring '06? Tight and neat, and worn with Bermudas. What's the news on the dress? Nude chiffon, banded in black. There's a printy, scarfy feeling out there: Bring on a few billowy Art Deco blouses. Nail "schoolgirl" in a tweed jumper. Check off crunchy lace with a sweet white A-line T-shirt and skirt. Compress puffed sleeves and boleros into a cropped taffeta jacket. Salute "folkloric" with a Spanish-pattern black-and-white sweater and a flounced skirt. And as for the chain belt? No problem—Chanel owns it!Part of the point of this is that Lagerfeld's febrile capacity for instant-uptake fashion can fill a football pitch—and yet still all look like Chanel. In reality, fashion is now more about the availability of a gazillion simultaneous choices rather than the single, old-school designer diktat. With this collection, Lagerfeld broke the taboo on saying that out loud—while also proving that a strong brand, strongly directed, can surf any trend without losing its identity. Does that mean Chanel has resigned itself to adapting to the culture of fast-fashion disposability, though? Oh, not at all. The fifties circle skirt and poufy taffeta dresses at the end of the show were pretty time-transcenders that might live in any girl's wardrobe for decades to come.
6 October 2005
People often talk about the theatrics of haute couture—the smoke, mirrors, flowers, props, sets, and rivers of Champagne—that go into the dizzying creation of a mise-en-scène. That’s all lovely, but it takes a genius of the stature of Karl Lagerfeld to strip back to the simplest device of all: a single-file march-out of extraordinary clothes. Thus it unfolded at Chanel, as girls in black coats, cloaks, or capes—Edwardian and high neck, severe and clerical, Empire and ingénue, gothic and rock 'n' roll, each brilliant in its own right—wound their way around a circular podium, then stood there, stock still.There was just enough time to absorb the contrasts between precisely sculpted shoulders, long billowy volumes, and short boxy patents, to register plumed collars and edgings of lace. And then, with a single gesture, the coats were opened. Underneath, sensory overload. Signature Chanel wool suits and shifts, fragile A-line chiffons, and eighteenth century Directoire fantasies appeared in a dizzying spectrum of sugar pinks, fuchsias, and subtle metallics, and the lining of every outerpiece was embroidered and decorated to match.“Hidden luxury” is how Karl Lagerfeld succinctly summed up his knowing spin on Coco Chanel's coordinated dress-and-coat sets of the late fifties. But it’s a major compliment to him that he spun that simple notion into such a wide-ranging creative collection. Chic, cool, romance, simplicity: It had the lot.
6 July 2005
With their ironed hair, pale lips, and exaggerated doe-eye makeup, the leggy girls on Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel runway were channeling Penelope Tree, the iconic and kooky sixties model. And in their black-and-white mini-kilts, abbreviated A-line dresses, and pleated cocktail hour "gym slips," they looked as though they had stepped from a David Bailey print. In fact, there was only one long dress in the collection—a drift of pale-gray cloudy chiffon prettily garlanded with ropes of seed pearls—but its diaphanous skirt revealed a mini beneath.Even the signature Chanel camellias, nestling as appliqués in textured salt-and-pepper tweed, were abstracted into something resembling a naive daisy, a flower symbol that carries with it more than a hint of the youthquake sixties fashions of Mary Quant and Courrèges. Of course, in Lagerfeld's deft hands this was no mere history lesson. The designer used those schoolgirl-short looks to focus on the leg with wrinkling kid boots so high that they disappeared beneath those tiny skirts' hems, or leggings in pale gold or silvery Lurex knits. Jeans and knickerbockers were cut as tight as hosiery and decorated with a flourish of Chanel's black satin hair ribbon at the knee.With a major Chanel retrospective opening in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, Lagerfeld also delved into Coco Chanel's history—specifically a 1920's liaison with the Duke of Westminster that saw her borrowing knits and tweedy pieces from his chic country wardrobe. Lagerfeld feminized his layered cardigan and plus fours with scarves twinkling with diamond camellias and topped them with adorable newsboy caps, knit cloches, or floppy berets. But the androgyny didn't stop there. This is the 50th anniversary of the quilted, chain-strung bag that is so emblematic of the house, and Lagerfeld reintroduced it—in a battered vintage-look leather set to become an instant must-have—on the men in his show, who wore them with a swagger, slung across their shoulders and backs.
3 March 2005
The marvel of Chanel haute couture is how Karl Lagerfeld can make it hover lightly over all the most interesting emerging trends without losing the house identity for a second. For spring, he touched on flowers (naming the collection French Garden), cross-pollinated them with references to the eighteenth century (upon which he is an authority), and breezed through fashion's current preoccupations with airiness and volume.If that sounds complicated, no need to worry. To begin with, Lagerfeld infused air and youth into the hardy perennial Chanel tweed suit by making the skirt blossom into a dirndl and shrinking the boxy jacket above. Chanel's marvelouspetits mainsand embroiderers did the rest by dissolving the potentially heavy house fabric into miraculously weightless surfaces.The romance of the eighteenth century is on the Parisian radar (Sofia Coppola'sMarie-Antoinetteis about to begin filming here, after all), and Lagerfeld homed in on the mood with tulle blouses featuring poet sleeves, as well as a sprinkling of silhouettes that evoked the sway-backed rococo volumes of dresses painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau. One sleeveless gold brocade dress came with a cape draped from the shoulder; a gray tweed coat, fitted neatly in front, had an elegant swing in back; and a pristine white organza ball gown echoed the same dramatic line.Still, this was no history lesson. This season, the collection seemed designed for a rather important upcoming date: the opening of the Chanel retrospective in New York in May, when the rococo-Coco dresses and all their pretty relations will be photographed in full bloom, tripping up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum en masse.
24 January 2005
"Nicole!" "Nicole, over here!" "Baz!" "Nicole!" "Baz…!" Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann's entrance into the Chanel show, to a soundtrack of cries from the paparazzi, was as spectacularly theatrical as any of his movies. Kidman and Luhrmann were there in their capacity as star and director of Chanel's new advertising campaign for No. 5. But of course, Karl Lagerfeld couldn't resist adding a subtext to this event.His runway was decked out with a red carpet—a witty nod to the one that Kidman walks in Luhrmann's ad. Moments later, superstars of another type—Linda Evangelista, Amber Valletta, Shalom Harlow, Naomi Campbell, Kristen McMenamy, and Nadja Auermann, all dressed in liquid black satin evening dress—began to walk the scarlet runner, while men ran alongside them popping flashbulbs. The message was clear: In an era when celebrity dressing has become so over exposed, it's only exciting when an actress has exceptional talent and style.The whiff of Kidman's presence in this collection was as heady as the house's famous scent. Her petite shoulders and slim, lithe frame were made for Chanel's small, sculpted jackets, ankle-skimming skirts, and sinuous dresses. For those not blessed with the bones, there was also a wide range (perhaps too wide; the ideas came striding out in rapid succession) of wearable clothes that would work for, well, work. The classic tweed cardigan jacket with a little nip at its waist; a trenchcoat with an oversized houndstooth check; and spring's omnipresent gypsy skirt now chicly dressed up in the house's signature bouclé. The many evening looks were matched with flat jeweled sandals, a casual approach to nighttime dressing that's been a distinct presence in Paris.Amid this evening section, there was one true star: a black velvet column, with a low back and a fishtail hem, which would make the perfect foil for jewelry (and happens to be the dress Kidman wears in the ad). If you're in the market for a true stunner, you—and every celebrity stylist out there dressing the nation's actresses—would be well advised to let it take a leading role next spring.
7 October 2004
Trust Karl Lagerfeld to rise above the cacophony of questions about the relevance of haute couture. At Chanel, he floated an argument that insouciantly covered the issues and showed what couture can be now: a beautifully thought-out, long-term investment that also addresses our multitasking world. “This is reality couture,” he said, adding, “It’s about duality.”That meant almost every outfit in the collection was in some way a transformer, as the designer took classic Chanel tweeds and created new ways to switch around a jacket, skirt, coat, and dress. Sometimes a pleated silk button-through shirtwaister or a veil of chiffon was unconventionally layered under a jacket or over a skirt. As always, it was hard to keep up with the deluge of Lagerfeldian transpositions, but the main message was clear. At Chanel, the principle of the daywear suit is alive and kicking, fully up to speed with a modern woman's many changing needs. Which, of course, is just the way Coco saw it in the first place.That applies as much to night moves as to day necessities. Taking the practical need for an evening “cover-up” as his starting point, Lagerfeld whipped up many finely layered ideas to give dresses a double identity.A woman could arrive at a party in one silhouette—say, a voluminous tulle Pierrot cape—and leave in the slim lace sheath beneath. What appeared to be a shell-pink evening suit with a long, crystal-studded jacket and fishtail skirt could later be revealed to be a drop-dead cutaway gown. Even a fragile, dainty cocktail mélange of dotted tulle and chantilly might be stripped down to another dress when the evening heats up.But no one could accuse Lagerfeld of mundane utilitarianism. This collection touched a higher kind of duality, too. Though fully of the twenty-first century, his best pieces—like the restrained black-and-white ensemble worn by Alek Wek—were also timeless Coco-isms: of the moment, yet guaranteed to outlast this and many seasons to come.
6 July 2004
Mercurial and easily bored as he is, Karl Lagerfeld knows exactly how to pick an appropriate Chanel theme—and when to drop it in a flash. For summer, his camellia-fresh pastel suits pinned down the ladylike mood to perfection; but now he's taken another of his 180-degree turns, setting off down the masculine/feminine road. Of course, that's hardly an egregious direction for this house. Coco Chanel went there first, when she purloined the jackets and cardigans of her British lover, Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, in the twenties and thirties. This season showed, for starters, exactly how far Chanel's iconic bouclé can stretch: dainty one moment, tweedy country-boyish the next.The opening suits, in mixes of brown, came out matched with newsboy caps in a collection that played fast and loose with Lagerfeld's notions about androgyny, urban streetwear, young dressing, and the old house staples. He literally put his kids on the street—a long asphalt road—and played tricks by sending out pretty boys among the girls. (A man in a Chanel braid-trimmed cardigan jacket: Now thatwasa first.)Lagerfeld stages shows the way he speaks—in a stream-of-consciousness deluge of ideas, references, puns, jokes, and digressions that is often too much for mere mortals to take in. The only way to click onto his crowded information superhighway is to stay calm, look for the big message (jackets and a proposed pant revival), and zero in on the items you'd like to wear. There were plenty of the latter—small jackets in oversized houndstooth tweed, coats in raggedy windowpane check, cute bags in tweed, miniature chain classics in black velvet or green mink, a novelty purse in the shape of a perfume bottle.Of the many non-tweedy ideas that came down the runway, some looked merely distracting, like an airing of the Chanel skiwear line, while others provided some calm, chic moments amid the melee. Three variations on men's velvet pantsuits (one with a cream lace jabot blouse) touched on a Little Lord Fauntleroy version of cross-dressing. And for those evenings when, frankly, a girl just wants to be a girl, there were a couple of gorgeous black, sequinned, thirties-inspired evening dresses.
4 March 2004
“Paradox. A mix of severity and frivolity,” said Karl Lagerfeld, explaining his high concept for Chanel’s spring haute couture. “That’s what modern sexiness is: ambiguity.” Think an impeccable plain jacket contradicted by a frothy-and-flounce skirt, or a cloudy tulle shrug grounded by a plumb line-straight column of black crêpe. Or perhaps a dress cut as sportily as a tank at the top that becomes a trail of extravagant frills by the time it reaches the floor.The last, worn by Liya Kebede and glinting with silver sequins, is a natural for the red carpet, and it sent the Hollywood stylists a-scribbling in their programs. The awards shows, needless to say, are a major bullet point on the couture-week agenda, and Lagerfeld checked it off to perfection. There was, though, a new sense of restraint in this collection. By rebalancing delicacy with discipline, Lagerfeld put just as much emphasis on defining the Chanel jacket as on all-out femininity. Those jackets—narrow, linear, and undecorated—hit at the top of the hip without a hint of cinch or cling, the better to contrast with a tulle puff of a skirt below. He also flipped the intellectual equation by working upper-body volume in billowing poet blouses paired with something straight and to the knee.Of course, making an elegant withdrawal from overt display is all relative when it comes to the haute couture. Intertwined with Lagerfeld’s play of opposites was the subtle planting of 3 million euros’ worth of spectacular Chanel fine jewelry.
19 January 2004
“It’s about Chanel, but wearing it played down,” announced Karl Lagerfeld, just before the Spring show. “Sweet, but not too ladylike.” Thus introduced, a parade of neat but never uptight soft little pastel-pink checked tweeds, dainty microprinted georgette dresses, guipure lace skirts, and fresh takes on Coco’s favorite tricot dressing trotted out happily. The inimitable signature jacket came light as a cardigan and delightfully trimmed with tiny raw-edged chiffon ruffles in place of the classic braided edging. To further underscore the superior abilities of Chanel’s workshops, Lagerfeld took the pattern of antique knitted bed covers (a labor-intensive, French-provincial technique called “ouvrage des dames”) and had it reproduced in narrow, scallop-edged cardigan coats which he slipped over short dresses. Even the teensy bikinis were done up in crochet.A cute idea popped up amid all this sweetness: the khaki trench, Chanelized by ridges of tweed inset at the seams. That’s no ordinary edging, as Lagerfeld took pains to point out; the tweed was specially woven by the great Parisian couture-craft supplier Lesage. In a world where the word “luxury” has been overused and devalued, Chanel is one house where the standard flies as high as ever. And it is Lagerfeld’s nonchalance with these to-die-for details that imbues the clothes with their essence of confident chic.
9 October 2003
For fall, Karl Lagerfeld showed graphic, rechopped teeny-weeny Chanel suits that, he said, were inspired by the work of Russian constructivist painter Kasimir Malevich. Girls won’t need an art-history class to get the idea, though: it’s all about a short double-layered A-line skirt (no longer than fingertip length), a minute tight-sleeved shrunken jacket, black blocked against white and a whole lot of funky leg action.Starting from that basis, Lagerfeld mixed things up with his usual polymath flair. The addition of slick black leather leg warmers and gauntlets meant the suit came over a bit biker chic; with white boots, it said space-age; and when he let a little lace peep from the pelmet, the tiny two-piece looked fully in touch with fall’s pretty femininity.The decorative vibe ran through the collection: purple tweed was edged with ruffles, a pastel suit was outlined with furry loops of wool, and tougher plaited leather pieces were connected with fragile zones of tulle. Details took the form of white rabbit-fur collars embedded with white jet, oversize silver chains studded with porcelain beads, high boots and a slew of puns on the tools of the trade—exposed zippers, necklaces made of huge snaps, and spirals of hooks and eyes winding around dresses.In the middle of all this, Lagerfeld staged a ski moment for the house's entire family, sending out Pat Cleveland with her children, Anna and Noel Van Ravenstein, in double-C down jackets and boots. In other words, all the usual playfulness of Chanel ready-to-wear was there, done with a light-handed touch that underscored Coco's legacy of flexibility—and fun— in the reign of King Karl.
9 March 2003
The more ominous the storm clouds, the lighter fashion should be. That seemed to be Karl Lagerfeld’s thinking as he sent out his most daintily airy Chanel collection ever. “Fragility,” he said. “Everything is almost weightless.” From first to last, the clothes were an exquisite achievement, crafted with such deftness and sweetness of color that even the house tweed evaporated into sparkling nothingness at the edges.The reinvention of the iconic Chanel suit began with fluted knee-length coats, worn, with ropes of glistening pearls at the neckline, over insubstantial, delicately frayed mousseline skirts. One suit, the color of frosted mint and pale coral, melted into chiffon at cuffs and hem. Then came ballerina skirts made of swingy puffs of spangled tulle, followed by a breathtaking sequence of slim dresses topped by sheer flower-embroidered layers.The fondant colors—palest pink, peach and blue—the overlays of black lace and the scatterings of silver sequins made every piece a vision of femininity. This was a triumphant collection for Lagerfeld, as realistically wearable as it was dreamily desirable.
20 January 2003
Severity plus sensuality in one silhouette—that’s the essence of Chanel couture for winter. Karl Lagerfeld cut a rigorous new shape for the iconic Chanel jacket, a line drawn from a high Edwardian collar, through a strong, slightly puffed shoulder, skinny arms and the narrowest waist possible. Pair that with a skirt that stays close to the hips, breaks into a swirl to the knee and is finished with deep ruffles of spangled tulle at the hem, and you have the main message.The buttoned-up, almost equestrian look of the jackets, some finished with immaculate high white pique collars, cuffs and bow ties, worked in perfect counterpoint with the accessories: seamed fishnet tights, shoes clasped at the ankle with gold beads that swished like charm bracelets, and beaded jewelry threaded into the piled-up hairdos. For evening, Lagerfeld exploited the fairy-fingered expertise of the Chanel coutureatelierto the max, from a standout gold sequin flapper dress to a lighter-than-air, lace-inserted strappy little black number.In what is shaping up as a good season for the frill and the ruffle, Lagerfeld set a fine example by pairing embellished skirts with plainer tops. These were the finer points the tiny audience were privileged to observe up close, in the traditional private couture manner, at Chanel headquarters at the Rue Cambon. It was also a chance to get a first viewing of the designer’s makeover of Coco’s couture salon, which—like most of his collection—is executed strictly in black and white, with the glamorous sparkle of Baccarat crystal chandeliers overhead.
8 July 2002
Karl Lagerfeld presented his Spring couture show in a hothouse, specially erected in the heart of the Tuilleries gardens. It turned out to be the perfect setting for the designer’s fresh-as-a-flower pink and black collection.Lagerfeld opened with a deluge of black coat-dresses—asymmetrically buttoned, scoop-necked or with velvet-ribbon ties—with pale-pink petticoats peeping out here and there. Then came camellia-colored flared bouclé coats worn with knee-length tunics, and rose and cream herringbone coat-dresses. One flesh-pink dress was embroidered with big sequined flowers. Another, in lightweight crepe, featured a simple crossover closure.Standard-issue pretty-in-pink, classic Chanel? No, thanks to a series of clever twists that Lagerfeld called “double takes.” A tight-fitting, long-sleeved redingote concealed a sleeveless dress whose pleated chiffon bib melded seamlessly with the lining of the coat. A deep silk-and-lace décolleté “siren” dress took on a demure dimension with the addition of a black smock-like organza jacket. The wedding dress was a spun-sugar confection: a bodice of finely pleated chiffon over a frothy skirt featuring a cascade of pink chiffon petals down the back, the whole thing coated with a light-as-air organza veil.The season’s surefire hit, though, has to be the witty detached-heel shoes, in a classic T-bar sandal or slingback, with a space between the metal heel and the back of the sole, leaving the foot floating several centimeters in the air.“Amusant, non?” the reed-thin couturier said with a smile backstage, before heading off to hold court with Madames Chirac and Pompidou.
21 January 2002
The newly rakish, ultrasvelte Karl Lagerfeld was in a youthful mood, opening his Chanel show with sporty motorcycle ensembles, two-tone sneakers, collegiate messenger bags and colorful backpacks.More traditional Chanel staples followed, in the house’s beloved black and white. Snappy little coats and sexy tunnel jackets lined in satin could be worn with fitted trousers, or on their own as skimpy minidresses. These were a prelude to more fluid, romantic silhouettes: For 2002, Chanel skirts are long and sheer, belted at the hip, knife-pleated and paired with simple cashmere tees. Muslin dresses also fall to the ankles, and can be layered under ruffled tops.Lagerfeld accented many of his more high-powered looks with rows of Coco pearls; these also turned up as sexy straps on his kitten-heel boots and shoes.
11 October 2001
Sublime is the word that comes to mind when looking at images from Karl Lagerfeld’s Spring 2001 couture collection for Chanel. It’s one in which he achieved a perfect balance between past and present; the models looked at once fresh and modern and like drawings that had come to life from the pages of 1930sVogue.Proof that there really can be a timelessness to classic design.Shown in the days before Chanel was doing film-worthy mega-sets, the arrangements were unfussy—walls painted in degrade tones of blue, reminiscent of a Riviera sky, with a huge gilded chain running along the base of wall—and the clothes were more powerful shown in such simplicity. To Hamish Bowles, the chain, a sort of super-sized version of the kind sewn into Chanel jackets to keep them in place, was “emblematic of the strong links between this collection and the legacy of Coco Chanel.”The chain also lent a sort of nautical aspect to the goings-on, which was quite fitting; Mademoiselle, a sun-lover credited with popularizing the tan, was famously photographed in a striped Breton top at her summer escape, circa 1929Having set the scene, Lagerfeld proceeded not to the sea, but in a wonderfully breezy direction. For evening there were incredible dreams of dresses to choose among, some restrained, almost boyish looks in black and white, and others more voluminous in the pastel colors of macaroons.The innovation over which editors spilled most ink, though, was the designer’s rethink of the house’s signature cardigan suit—the piece that became the anchor of the second chapter of Coco’s career. “A Chanel jacket is cut like a glove, so slender it tucks inside a skirt,” reported Bowles. “Karl is all about paradox,” Amanda Harlech had told him days prior to the show. “The line is ‘safe,’ but it’s got edginess in the details.” Details including fabrics sequined in Ottoman patterns, and skirts embroidered with a constellation of glittering sequins. “True to Lagerfeld’s delight in contrast,” Bowles noted, “these confections will be juxtaposed with mannish details: A pleated blouse will form the body of a tweed suit; the wedding dress will get a shirt and tie.”That wedding look, with its tucked and beribboned skirt that could have been painted by the 19th-century French artist James Tissot, was worn by Devon Aoki in the show, and later photographed in the Chanel Haute Couture atelier onBridget Jonesstar Renée Zellweger, who modeled the collections forVogue.
As memorable as that sitting was, it wasn’t Zellweger who made this collection one for the history books; the credit for that goes to Jennifer Lopez who daringly wore the look modeled by Carmen Kass to the 2001 Academy Awards.Seemingly a paradigm of simple elegance, the dress had a voluminous oyster-colored ball skirt that was topped with a greige off-the shoulder chiffon top. Some members of the press were delighted to notice that it wasn’t opaque. Instead of pearls, Lopez accessorized the looks with megawatt diamonds (including chandelier earrings from Fred Leighton) to complement her star—or should we say étoile?—power.
19 January 2019
On the anniversary of Karl Lagerfeld’s death, we look back at his fall 2000 collection for Chanel, presented in Paris in March 2000.A year after Karl Lagerfeld’s death, we’ve gone back into the archives to retrieve the designer’s first-rate Fall 2000 collection, shown 20 years ago in Paris. The set wasn’t over-the-top elaborate, and the front row was more socialite- than celebrity-heavy (though Julianne Moore, Carole Bouquet, and Isabella Blow were in attendance), which threw the clothes into the spotlight where they belonged. Not that they were showy—they weren’t—but because they were keepers and oh-so-Chanel.Fall 2000 was, overall, the season of the lady. One who had polish—and, likely, two homes and one eye on the fluctuating stock market. “With the Dow Jones and Nasdaq soaring and plunging like a late-sixties hemline,” wrote Sally Singer inVogue,“it was perhaps inevitable that many designers would choose for fall 2000 to forgo fantasy and get back to basics—luxe basics, that is.” At Chanel that meant cardigan suits and LBDs, but also denim and active ski gear (this was before global warming made snow a real rarity).Lagerfeld was, in fact, much more easygoing about the bougie vibe than many other designers were. He always delighted in subversion, whether of the house codes or the play of opposites, be that high/low or some other unexpected pairing. Look 42, a softly pleated pastel green chiffon shirt with softly inflated shoulders worn with a logo scarf and leather-topped jeans, hit just the right balance.Upending Chanelisms was not Lagerfeld’s goal for Fall 2000, but he worked with the building blocks (as opposed to basics) with which Coco Chanel built a wardrobe for active women while adding his own touches, like whisper-light pleated skirts or midi-length ones of quilted down. (The double-C tights deserve mention too.) Asked to elaborate on his inspiration, Lagerfeld said he had been looking at and thinking about “early ready-to-wear, the end of couture, Courreges meeting Chanel.” More important was what he had been feeling: “It’s about the attitude of the early ’60s—my own memories of Jean Shrimpton and all the girls in those happy, easy days.”For all of the joyous fashion moments Lagerfeld gave us over the course of his prolific career, we say thank you.
19 February 2020
We’re counting down to the Spring 2019 couture season with a look back at five very haute archival shows. Chanel’s Fall 2000 couture collection was presented on July 11, 2000, at Piscine Keller in Paris.Karl Lagerfeld might not be able to walk on water, but he seemed to walk through it when he took a bow with Devon Aoki at the close of his Fall 2000 couture collection for Chanel, the first he presented in the 21st century. Shown in the turquoise interior of the Piscine Keller in Paris, it featured predominantly to-the-knee silhouettes, and there was a breeziness to the palette, if not to the styling.Having inherited a legacy house, Lagerfeld has become a master of looking forward and back at the same time; and this season, he collided decades with force. Models woreValley of the Dolls–style bouffants (’60s) and New Wave–esque makeup (’80s). “The shoulders are back but without looking like the ’80s,” Lagerfeld toldThe Observerat the time. “Please, no. This is a remix for 2000.”Some of those shoulders were adorned with shredded tulle ruffs. Chanel, said Lagerfeld, “often did destroyed tulle and things like this.” While it’s well known that Mademoiselle would take pieces apart over and over again in her search for perfection, she was hardly the deconstructivist Lagerfeld is. He exposed seams at Chloé long before joining Chanel, where he disassembled the engine and put it back together in modern, imaginative, and attention-getting ways.Coco Chanel is credited with saying “Elegance is refusal.” Lagerfeld, too, knows when to draw the line. When asked inThe Observerstory what the point of couture is, Lagerfeld replied: “The point of couture is couture itself. It’s like asking what is the point of life. Life is about life.”
18 January 2019
Editor’s Note: When we talk about Y2K in fashion we talk about a look, but it’s 1999 that is the turning point. As Nicole Phelps turns her attention to this special year, we are adding five archival shows to the archive.At Chanel’s fall 1999 ready-to-wear show, the set was stark and open, and models walked around an oval with 1999 printed in its center. There was a touch of the medieval—perhaps even survivalist—in the shearlings and flat musketeer boots. Belts of metal chains were tough; the amulets that dangled from them read as protective talismans, which were well-suited to the what-comes-next mood of the time.
26 August 2024
We’re counting down to the Spring 2019 Couture season with a look back at five very haute archival shows. Chanel’s Spring 1999 Couture collection was presented on January 19, 1999, in Paris.Lightness is the quality that makes Karl Lagerfeld’s couture collections sing, season after season. He gave the concept a literal spin for Spring 1999 by abolishing black from this collection entirely. Chez Chanel this is big news—on par with the designer removing his ever-present sunglasses, which is as rare as snow in June.There was a quietness to this collection that the neutral and pastel palette contributed to. “Floating tulle and organza perfectly capture[d] the collection’s dreamy mood,” notedVogue.Grace Coddington channeled that ethereality when she styled Audrey Marnay in a transparent wisp-of-a-dress for the March issue’s Ravishing Couture portfolio.Maisons de couture have workrooms dedicated to flou (draping) and tailoring. Lagerfeld didn’t ignore the latter, but there wasn’t an ounce of stiffness in the soft, almost sporty, haberdashery he sent out this season. In place of black, metallics were used throughout. Bold accessories offered a contrast to the suppleness of the collection. Small, sculpted gold bags and earrings that were abstract falls of silver hoops inserted a sort of “tech-y” vibe into the goings-on and seemed to signal that as the fin de siècle loomed, Lagerfeld was looking forward, not back. The relative scarcity of Cocoisms meant there was more room for a bit of playfulness, like the triple scoop of sherbet-colored taffeta looks that appeared near the end of the show, worn by Devon Aoki (raspberry), Colette Pechekhonova (blueberry), and Esther Cañadas (lemon). They proved so utterly irresistible that Uma Thurman wore Cañadas’s dress to the Oscars that year, andVoguefeatured one of Lagerfeld’s ball skirts on its April 1999 cover alongside a cheery cover line that read: “Here Comes the Sun.”
16 January 2019
We’re counting down to the Spring 2019 Couture season with a look back at five very haute archival shows. Chanel’s Fall 1999 Couture collection was presented on July 20, 1999 in Paris.In July 1999 Diddy (then known as Puff Daddy) “stormed” Paris to promote hisForeveralbum and and take in the Fall 1999 couture collections with Annie Leibovitz and Kate Moss in tow. “He’s booked a entire room in his hotel just as his closet,” notedVogue’s Plum Sykes, who was on hand to record the event. “But then he’s shipped 18 trunks of clothes, along with two stylists, a hair person, a makeup person. There’s also a case of platinum and diamonds, 45 pairs of shoes, 26 hats, two assistants, four body guards, two publicists, record managers, road managers.” Though his presence electrified the scene, Diddy’s approach to the good life—“I don’t count carats and I don’t look at price tags anymore,” he told the magazine—mirrored that of some of the front row clientele.Unexpected mash-ups weren’t limited to seating charts that season at Chanel. Karl Lagerfeld created some top-down frisson with his models, who wore multicolored fauxhawks and ankle-strap stilettos with their ladylike ensembles. Among the soft suiting and LBDs, one of which the designer dubbed “Version 2000,” were unexpected surprises, including snowflake-like pom-poms that decorated the neck of a powder-pink suit and were strung into a fantastical shawl. At one point Karen Elson appeared in a cone-shaped quilted down dress colored lipstick-red; there was also a statement-making coat of bearlike dimensions made of silver tinsel. The majority of the collection was more season-appropriate—even beachy (see Naomi Campbell in an ivory crochet set and Trish Goff in an inky boho slip dress with lace inserts).Diddy might not have believed in traveling light, but an airy weightlessness, as ever, described Lagerfeld’s showstopping looks. A cream chiffon column with tails that was later photographed on Kate Moss forVogue, was described by the magazine as “an exercise in unrestrained luxury,” suggesting it was representative of “the dream life of angels.” Devon Aoki closed the show in a hooded cape-and-dress wedding ensemble that looked like a parachute and gave her, for all the world, the appearance of an earth angel newly arrived on planet couture.
17 January 2019
We’re counting down to the Spring 2019 Couture season with a look back at five very haute archival shows. Chanel’s Spring 1997 Couture collection was presented on January 20, 1997, at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.Like a hothouse orchid, the couture exists in a rarified (and contained) environment. Though its influence and even its existence have often been called into question, the métier has proven remarkably resilient. It weathered rather well, for example, the shake-up of the Spring 1997 season, when the scrappy young Brits John Galliano and Alexander McQueen made their debuts as the heads of the esteemed French housesChristian DiorandGivenchy, respectively.Behind the scenes, Amanda Harlech, a trusted arbiter of taste, jumped from Dior to Chanel just in time to put finishing touches on a collection of what Karl Lagerfeld described as nonexistent dresses and exploded shoes. “It’s hysterical Chanel,” the designer said. Harlech expanded on that, telling Hamish Bowles, “It’s about Chanel proportions and luxury pushed to absolute nervous-breakdown extremes!”While the press, includingVogue,was focused on the “showdown” between the vanguard and the old guard, Lagerfeld held steady. Just as the rooms he showed in at the Ritz were veiled with tulle, so he wrapped his creations in luxury, replacing buttons with real pearls or diamond camellia clip brooches. Adding a sense of fun were the dramatic headpieces by Philip Treacy, some of which bobbed atop heads like antennae tuned into chic.There were LBDs galore, along with wide-legged pantsuits, however the “unbearable lightness of being” Lagerfeld was after was to be found in the evening looks, many with silhouettes that nodded to the late ’20s and early ’30s—Coco Chanel’s own heyday. Shalom Harlow wore the collection’s pièce de résistance (in which she’d later be photographed by Peter Lindbergh for this magazine): a feather-white strapless confection, which looked as if it were crafted from air. Over a stem of pale chiffon, the atelier had constructed a 3-D “cage” of many, many camellias made of sequins, and then cut the fabric ground away so that it resembled a Wilson Bentley photograph of a snowflake or the tracery of a stained glass window. It was a marvel of craft and a thing of beauty, which as Keats taught us, “is a joy for ever.” That’s couture for you.
15 January 2019
Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is closing out the decade by adding six archival Chanel shows to our collections archive. They honor the memory of Karl Lagerfeld, the giant and prolific talent who designed them, and speak to the 2010s obsession with all things 1990s. These shows might be pre-internet, but they contain many Instagrammable moments. Do share.Guests arrived at Chanel’s spring 1996 show to find a giant globe sitting at the end of the runway. When the lights went down, it split open to reveal Claudia Schiffer, Karl Lagerfeld’s muse at the time. What did it symbolize? That the Chanel codes had gone “viral”? Or that the house was at the center of the fashion galaxy? In the end, it acted like a prop against which the designer played with the ideas of casual dressing and escapism.Months after this collection was shown,Voguepublished “Fear of Fridays,” an article that spoke about the tailspin caused by the spread of the casual-Friday concept in business, one that gave rise to a new, more comfortable work uniform built around chinos. Lagerfeld swapped out the preppy blue blazer for a pastel one, added a cropped T-shirt (which was certainly not work appropriate at that time) and a belt or two,et voilà! Casual chic the Chanel way.Having given a slight tomboy twist to ladylike separates, Lagerfeld took things up or down a notch—depending on how you look at it—in the casual stakes. A denim story was followed by a sportier sun-and-sand section that included nylon beach shorts. Amber Valletta’s were paired with a bikini “top” made out of logoed pasties that were tentatively held in place with a slender string. Hey, they would have been safe for Instagram. More traditional swimwear was on offer as well. AVoguearticle titled “Taste Test” suggested that “Lagerfeld was doing a nice little send-up of the trashy glamour ofBaywatch.” The following section anticipated Juicy Couture by nearly a decade; it consisted of logoed velour pieces—including tracksuits.Propriety ruled in the end. The show concluded with a series of evening looks that were somewhat early ’60s in their silhouettes, all in white shantung and trimmed with sequined florals.
30 December 2019
Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is closing out the decade by adding six archival Chanel shows to our collections archive. They honor the memory of Karl Lagerfeld, the giant and prolific talent who designed them, and speak to the 2010s obsession with all things 1990s. These shows might be pre-internet, but they contain many Instagrammable moments. Do share.By 1995 good taste, which had always been associated with the house of Chanel, was no longer an immutable quality. Karl Lagerfeld liked it that way. No one seemed to enjoy pushing good taste to the edge of bad more, and he had a field day with this push and pull at his fall 1995 show. Models, teetering on Frederick’s of Hollywood–style platform sandals with spike heels, wore deconstructions of the classics. Abbreviated-midriff baring jackets weren’t all that shocking, but skirts with slits and zips designed to reveal matching tweed panties were piquant. Cheekier still were the bedazzled bras and thongs worn as bikinis or under fine black knits that hardly inhibited their sparkle. Corselet-like inserts on suits and as waistbands on skirts further played on the lingerie theme.That Lagerfeld was playing a game was suggested by his use of synthetics. Double C’s were appliquéd on clear totes; cellophane was used as a headdress; and a maxi-size Chanel bag, the pièce de résistance, was made of Astroturf. It would probably bring in a mint at auction today.Coco Chanel, it should be remembered, was a self-invented and self-made woman, and this collection, as all of Lagerfeld’s work for the house, was tied back to her. There were belts with frames holding pictures of her face, but these were nothing compared to the finale for which Lagerfeld brought to life a famous photo of Coco. Though undated, it was likely taken in the 1920s or ’30s and shows Mademoiselle sitting on the compact but steely shoulders of her friend dancer Serge Lifar. Her hair is wrapped in a band, and she’s wearing white pants with a dark top that she’s accessorized with layered strands of pearls. Spectator-style platform sandals and a smile complete her look. The image distills café society chic in its pure—and still modern-looking—essence.In 2019 this finale would read as nostalgic, but in “The Chanel Obsession,” a 1991 article forVogue,journalist Jane Kramer linked Lagerfeld’s tenure at Chanel with the rise of Postmodernism.
In the piece, Kramer notes that 1983 (the year Lagerfeld joined Chanel) was “the year modernism in art and architecture and design and even literature began to give way to ‘citation’ and ‘quotation,’ and images of the past became, so to speak, the accessories of the present.” Over time at Chanel, those images referred both way back to the house founder and to the innovations made by Lagerfeld, who reinvented the brand for the 21st century. Lagerfeld, taking a page from Gustave Flaubert, might have said, “Mademoiselle, c’est moi.”
27 December 2019
Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is closing out the decade by adding six archival Chanel shows to our collections archive. They honor the memory of Karl Lagerfeld, the giant and prolific talent who designed them, and speak to the 2010s obsession with all things 1990s. These shows might be pre-internet, but they contain many Instagrammable moments. Do share.Like Coco Chanel who mixed fine jewelry with paste—and encouraged other women to do the same—Karl Lagerfeld knew his fur from his fluff. For fall 1994 he treated the Chanel suit to a snow bunny makeover. There were “fur” and “fur”-trimmed jackets and skirts, and nylon ski pants and shorts paired with tweed toppers. All were framed,Voguereported, by a set that included “a director’s chair, a mock movie camera, and klieg lights,” which read as “a jab at director Robert Altman’s overexposed fashion flick,Pret-à-Porter.”Accessories played leading roles in this collection. Among them: baby bear bags attached to mama bear ones, headbands of intertwining C’s, and the houses take on the sturdy Wellie. Shall we call it the Chanellie? As they strode down the catwalk, models pretended to make phone calls from O.G. flip phones—with antennae!—that were sheathed in bejeweled Chanel cases. The pièce de résistance was a shoulder-hung, leather-threaded gold-chain water bottle holder. (Designer water was trending at the time. As Amy Astley wrote in the June 1994 issue ofVogue:“Water consciousness has reached a new level of chic as it moves from the gym to the street.”) Lagerfeld was well aware that the Chanel customer knew the benefit of exercise, the importance of hydration, and the value of ice—the kind that’s measured in carats.
26 December 2019
“Fashion today is more about attitude than detailing.” That sounds like somethingKarl Lagerfeldwould say in 2015, but he was spouting such wisdom as far back as late 1993, when he looked to the streets for Chanel’s Spring 1994 pastel tweed suits accessorized with oversize rapper’s chains and baggy boy shorts held up with suspenders. More proof that Lagerfeld was and is the industry’s pre-eminent pop culture sponge? Capping it all off: a pair of popular-in-the-nineties in-line skates covered with—what else?—Chanel’s double-C
1 October 1994
Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is closing out the decade by adding six archival Chanel shows to our collections archive. They honor the memory of Karl Lagerfeld, the giant and prolific talent who designed them, and speak to the 2010s obsession with all things 1990s. These shows might be pre-internet, but they contain many Instagrammable moments. Do share.Karl Lagerfeld cast many models as Cocos over the course of his career; it was comedian Sandra Bernhard’s turn to play the part of Mademoiselle in Chanel’s spring 1993 show. The likeness was uncanny, and in retrospect should have been a hint that there was some funny business afoot. Lagerfeld’s main conceit for the season was to pair the house’s tweed jackets with logoed men’s briefs à la Calvin Klein. Unlike the Marky Mark and Kate Moss ads of the same year, at Chanel the effect wasn’t sizzle but camp. Men’s briefs, Lagerfeld told theNew York Times,are “the last thing women haven’t taken from the men.” Ultimately, though, the real news here was in the hyper-femininity of the opening look’s back-zipped corset and the generous 18th-century-style décolletage it created.Thiswas the erogenous zone that would interest Lagerfeld for the next few seasons.Another way that the designer played with the innerwear-as-outerwear trend was to pair bras, rather than shirts or tees or tanks, with tweedy jackets. There was also a series of floaty romantic embroidered dresses in the softest of pastels. The collection’svoulez-vous couchez avec moicame at the finale, when Lagerfeld sent out a parade of cool, virginal white summer dresses that seemed to have been assembled using the contents of a linen closet and featured embroideries and openwork typically used for bedclothes.
25 December 2019
Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is closing out the decade by adding six archival Chanel shows to our collections archive. They honor the memory of Karl Lagerfeld, the giant and prolific talent who designed them, and speak to the 2010s obsession with all things 1990s. These shows might be pre-internet, but they contain many Instagrammable moments. Do share.Chanel’s spring 1992 show opened with Linda Evangelista emerging, sort of like Little Red Riding Hood, from an enchanted forest boasting trees “carved” with hearts, intertwined C’s, and the motto “I love Coco.” Helena Christensen accessorized a little white dress with a rope of camellia-strung ivy that wrapped around her head and arms. Claudia Schiffer carried an adorable mushroom bag with a red-and-white polka dot cap, and Christy Turlington sported a hat made of wheat stalks. Then about halfway through the show, Karl Lagerfeld made it clear that this was no Eden full of naive Eves via belted military suits worn with huge fig leaves of the sort Adam usually wears.The show’s focus was on borrowed-from-the boys shirting and tank tops. Those items can be linked to Coco; the house founder was known for both raiding her lovers’ wardrobes and proposing humble jersey knit, at the time only used for men’s underclothes, as material suitable for dressmaking. The high-low mix was certainly much in evidence in this collection. “You put a men’s tank top underneath [a suit] to bring it down-to-earth. It’s more modern but still suits a certain way of life,” Lagerfeld toldVogue.“Only now the feeling is more natural.” In an enchanted-kind-of-forest way, that is.
24 December 2019
Editor’s Note: VogueRunway is closing out the decade by adding six archival Chanel shows to our collections archive. They honor the memory of Karl Lagerfeld, a giant and prolific talent, who designed them, and speak, too, to the 2010s’ obsession with all things 1990s. These shows might be pre-internet, but they contain many Instagrammable moments. Do share.Back in 1991 Karl Lagerfeld was still in the process of rebranding Chanel into a modern luxury house rather than one known as a go-to destination for well-to-do matrons. To bring youth and interest to the brand—as well as to underline the many recognizable and covetable brand icons, like the camelia, gold chains, quilting, tweed, etc.—he channeled them through of-the-moment filters in unexpected, and sometimes camp, ways. (A model in this show carried a spoon with which to stir her teacup hat.) It must be remembered that this was not an anything-goes moment in fashion; rules existed and breaking them offered a certain frisson. In this environment Lagerefeld’s twists on tradition had a certain level of shock value.“Lagerfeld is deliberately provocative,” notedVoguein January 1992, “taking his Chanel show to the edge of an abyss of kitsch and funk. His wild accessorizing with heavy metal and biker boots has had a powerful influence.” His genius was what today would be called the high/low mix, but might be better understood as uptown meets downtown, a distinction that speaks more of status than geography.Voguephotographed Karen Mulder looking like a million bucks in the designer’s artfully frayed denim mini, curve-hugging pink tweed jacket, and white T-shirt worn with a number of the layered chains and belts that appeared with headline-making profusion on the runway. (Lagerfeld told a wire service at the time that the models were adorned “just like a Christmas tree.”) More provocative still were the seamed fishnet stockings, BDSM-lite dog collars, and camelia pasties attached to a mesh body stocking. Quilted biker jackets and boots were paired with tulle ball skirts.Mon dieu!Fall 1991 has often been referred to as Lagerfeld’s “hip-hop” collection, but perhaps it’s time for a reappraisal. According to Reuters, “deafening rock and roll rhythms by Madonna accompanied models as they tore off black vinyl trench coats to expose sheer mesh catsuits.
” Was this lineup, with its tulle skirts, Boy-Toy-style plaques, and layered jewelry, Lagerfeld’s “Like a Virgin” turn? Whatever the case, it’s indisputable that Lagerfeld was able to turn just about anyone into a “material girl”—regardless of zip code.
23 December 2019