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, Vogue reported, 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 of Vogue: “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.
