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 the New 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. This was 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’s voulez-vous couchez avec moi came 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.
