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 houses Christian Dior and Givenchy, 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, including Vogue, 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.
