“Behind the girls in the show, there are 200 more who make what they wear—that’s quite a lot, no?—and I thought we should show them to the public too.” Karl Lagerfeld was standing in the midst of possibly the cleverest setup he’s yet devised as a backdrop for a Chanel couture collection. He’d shipped the entire staff of the ateliers, which are housed on Rue Cambon—along with their dummies, sewing machines, cutting tables, fabrics, embroidery materials, canvas toiles, every specialist tool of the trade—to the Grand Palais, and asked them to carry on working as usual in their transplanted environment. In the old days, Coco Chanel invited her audience to shows in her house, but this time the house came to the audience. Scrutinizing what was going on from the vantage point of the front row, Will Smith and Jessica Chastain were at first speculating over whether the petites mains were members of their own profession—actors. But no: This was no art installation, Broadway set, or movie production, but the actual behind-the-scenes people who physically made the clothes that were walking on the models.
You don’t get a complete sense of Chanel’s “reality” show from the front-on pictures in this gallery, but the audience was facing sideways-on, viewing the models, with their piled-up curly hair, their cropped tweed wide-leg pantsuits, and their extraordinarily wide, yet flatly squared-off shoulders in profile. To watch them striding past the atelier craftspeople as they carried on sewing and embroidering turned out to be the best angle on the collection, as it was all down to the silhouette of those shoulders, the cool proportions of the kitten-heeled, ankle-hugging black suede boots under the cropped wide pants, and the low-swooping belled skirt shapes of the duchesse satin dresses that came later.
Close up, naked-eye viewing of such feats as Chanel’s floriform embroidery, overlapping paillettes, and embedded strands of emerald and ruby stones can’t be rivaled by what digital technology is capable of recording. Couture is a 3-D experience because the development of these clothes is done in the round, draped on a mannequin, and ultimately developed to fit the specific human body of the person who buys them. After the show, it transpired that the atelier desks, and the walls behind them were full of all the work-in-progress stages of the garments in the show; Karl Lagerfeld’s sketches, canvas toiles recording the internal structures of dresses and jackets, charts of fabric samples, the paper printouts of jewelry that are moved around on patterns while the embroidery-placement decisions are being made.
As a demonstration—proof, really—of the actual value of haute couture, it couldn’t have been clearer or more awe-inspiring. Grand gestures, travel to exotic locations, surreal wit, and topical sociological commentary are all very well as settings for fashion shows, but on this occasion the in-house reality was just as astonishing.
