We’re counting down to the Spring 2019 Couture season with a look back at five very haute archival shows. Chanel’s Fall 1999 Couture collection was presented on July 20, 1999 in Paris.
In July 1999 Diddy (then known as Puff Daddy) “stormed” Paris to promote his Forever album and and take in the Fall 1999 couture collections with Annie Leibovitz and Kate Moss in tow. “He’s booked a entire room in his hotel just as his closet,” noted Vogue’s Plum Sykes, who was on hand to record the event. “But then he’s shipped 18 trunks of clothes, along with two stylists, a hair person, a makeup person. There’s also a case of platinum and diamonds, 45 pairs of shoes, 26 hats, two assistants, four body guards, two publicists, record managers, road managers.” Though his presence electrified the scene, Diddy’s approach to the good life—“I don’t count carats and I don’t look at price tags anymore,” he told the magazine—mirrored that of some of the front row clientele.
Unexpected mash-ups weren’t limited to seating charts that season at Chanel. Karl Lagerfeld created some top-down frisson with his models, who wore multicolored fauxhawks and ankle-strap stilettos with their ladylike ensembles. Among the soft suiting and LBDs, one of which the designer dubbed “Version 2000,” were unexpected surprises, including snowflake-like pom-poms that decorated the neck of a powder-pink suit and were strung into a fantastical shawl. At one point Karen Elson appeared in a cone-shaped quilted down dress colored lipstick-red; there was also a statement-making coat of bearlike dimensions made of silver tinsel. The majority of the collection was more season-appropriate—even beachy (see Naomi Campbell in an ivory crochet set and Trish Goff in an inky boho slip dress with lace inserts).
Diddy might not have believed in traveling light, but an airy weightlessness, as ever, described Lagerfeld’s showstopping looks. A cream chiffon column with tails that was later photographed on Kate Moss for Vogue, was described by the magazine as “an exercise in unrestrained luxury,” suggesting it was representative of “the dream life of angels.” Devon Aoki closed the show in a hooded cape-and-dress wedding ensemble that looked like a parachute and gave her, for all the world, the appearance of an earth angel newly arrived on planet couture.
