Chanel AF. Chanel SS’97 Couture

April 19, 2023April 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

On Monday, May 1st, the 2023 Met Gala will take place. This year’s Costume Institute exhibition, “A Line of Beauty,” will celebrate the oeuvre and life of Karl Lagerfeld. The exhibition will see Andrew Bolton and Wendy Yu, curators in charge, examine the work of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019). Throughout his lifetime, Lagerfeld worked at prominent fashion houses such as Balmain, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, in addition to founding his namesake brand. More than 150 pieces will be on display in the exhibition, many of which will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s sketches. In the following days, I will look back at my all-time favorite Chanel collections, designed by the one & only Karl. Hope some of these magnificent looks will end up on the red carpet on the first Monday in May…

First up is the stunning spring-summer 1997 haute couture collection. It’s a Lagerfeld collection that can be simply summed up as “Chanel af“. 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!” Just as the rooms he showed in at the Ritz were veiled with tulle, so Lagerfeld 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: 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. Possibly, that’s one of the chicest collection ever in fashion history.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Scent of Camellia. Chanel AW23

March 9, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

At Chanel, Virginie Viard did her usual thing: a spontaneous, instinctual take on the Chanel wardrobe. For autumn-winter 2023 season, it was sprinkled with silk, white camellias – the brand’s famous signifiers. Viard had even organized a giant symbolic white camellia as a set, and had a real one placed on every guest’s seat. “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. 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 aforementioned 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 – not always with success. 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 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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Habitat. Chanel SS23 Couture

January 25, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The latest Chanel couture collection is drama-free and controversy-negative. Generally pretty and easily digestible clothes. And there were animals, too – but not in a Schiaparelli kind of way. What comes up when you research Coco Chanel’s home interior is her love for an animal theme: 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 collaborated with the artist Xavier Veilhan to come up with a set idea for the spring-summer 2023 couture show orbiting around Coco’s cozy habitat. A parade of something between cute Chanel drum majorettes, or perhaps, circus ringmasters, appeared on yesterday’s runway. 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. 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 charming sight.