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 for Vogue, 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.”
