The marvel of Chanel haute couture is how Karl Lagerfeld can make it hover lightly over all the most interesting emerging trends without losing the house identity for a second. For spring, he touched on flowers (naming the collection French Garden), cross-pollinated them with references to the eighteenth century (upon which he is an authority), and breezed through fashion's current preoccupations with airiness and volume.
If that sounds complicated, no need to worry. To begin with, Lagerfeld infused air and youth into the hardy perennial Chanel tweed suit by making the skirt blossom into a dirndl and shrinking the boxy jacket above. Chanel's marvelous petits mains and embroiderers did the rest by dissolving the potentially heavy house fabric into miraculously weightless surfaces.
The romance of the eighteenth century is on the Parisian radar (Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette is about to begin filming here, after all), and Lagerfeld homed in on the mood with tulle blouses featuring poet sleeves, as well as a sprinkling of silhouettes that evoked the sway-backed rococo volumes of dresses painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau. One sleeveless gold brocade dress came with a cape draped from the shoulder; a gray tweed coat, fitted neatly in front, had an elegant swing in back; and a pristine white organza ball gown echoed the same dramatic line.
Still, this was no history lesson. This season, the collection seemed designed for a rather important upcoming date: the opening of the Chanel retrospective in New York in May, when the rococo-Coco dresses and all their pretty relations will be photographed in full bloom, tripping up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum en masse.
