Mercurial and easily bored as he is, Karl Lagerfeld knows exactly how to pick an appropriate Chanel theme—and when to drop it in a flash. For summer, his camellia-fresh pastel suits pinned down the ladylike mood to perfection; but now he's taken another of his 180-degree turns, setting off down the masculine/feminine road. Of course, that's hardly an egregious direction for this house. Coco Chanel went there first, when she purloined the jackets and cardigans of her British lover, Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, in the twenties and thirties. This season showed, for starters, exactly how far Chanel's iconic bouclé can stretch: dainty one moment, tweedy country-boyish the next.
The opening suits, in mixes of brown, came out matched with newsboy caps in a collection that played fast and loose with Lagerfeld's notions about androgyny, urban streetwear, young dressing, and the old house staples. He literally put his kids on the street—a long asphalt road—and played tricks by sending out pretty boys among the girls. (A man in a Chanel braid-trimmed cardigan jacket: Now that was a first.)
Lagerfeld stages shows the way he speaks—in a stream-of-consciousness deluge of ideas, references, puns, jokes, and digressions that is often too much for mere mortals to take in. The only way to click onto his crowded information superhighway is to stay calm, look for the big message (jackets and a proposed pant revival), and zero in on the items you'd like to wear. There were plenty of the latter—small jackets in oversized houndstooth tweed, coats in raggedy windowpane check, cute bags in tweed, miniature chain classics in black velvet or green mink, a novelty purse in the shape of a perfume bottle.
Of the many non-tweedy ideas that came down the runway, some looked merely distracting, like an airing of the Chanel skiwear line, while others provided some calm, chic moments amid the melee. Three variations on men's velvet pantsuits (one with a cream lace jabot blouse) touched on a Little Lord Fauntleroy version of cross-dressing. And for those evenings when, frankly, a girl just wants to be a girl, there were a couple of gorgeous black, sequinned, thirties-inspired evening dresses.
