Should Karl Lagerfeld ever find a moment to tear himself away from his books and his drawing pads and happen to look out the windows of the sleek spaceship apartment that serves as home for him and his beloved cat, Choupette, he would see a magnificent view of the Seine and the green-painted wooden stands of the boquinistes plying their trade of old books, prints, and magazines, as they have for centuries in this powerfully evocative place.
For the Chanel Fall haute couture show, Lagerfeld evoked that view—with its wide sidewalks and low stone walls framing the magnificent Institut de France, built by Louis le Vau for Cardinal Mazarin in the 1660s (and where the Academie Française is housed)—and sent out a collection whose steely coloring and focus was an homage to the city that he has known since the 1950s.
“I came to live here when I was 18,” Lagerfeld remembered during a fitting on the eve of the show, recalling a city still suffering from postwar neglect, with “dirty streets” and dark, unrestored buildings. “People said to my parents, ‘But he can get lost,’” he added. “My mother knew better: I had a strong survivor instinct!” Despite the city’s drear, survivor Karl fell in love with it—and the affair has proved enduring.
The collection’s tweeds, failles, and chiffons evoked the nuances of the city’s greige stone facades beneath smoldering gray skies, lit by astonishing embroideries that sparkled like the lights of the bateaux mouches on the Seine, and showcased the nonpareil workmanship of the great fashion fournisseurs that Chanel has acquired to ensure its flourishing survival. “High fashion is about Paris, huh?” queried Lagerfeld, and certainly no one makes clothes like the Chanel couture atelier.
This season, he has built everything around what he calls the “high profile”—long skirts that unzip to the thigh to reveal provocative miniskirts beneath. “You can wear it zipped down when you visit your banker, no?” said the designer during a preview, “and zipped up when you see your lover after!” The narrow sleeves unzip to the perfectly defined shoulder, too, revealing silk and chiffon linings quilted by hand to resemble the signature Chanel purse—a refinement that only the wearer would appreciate.
And the refinements don’t stop there: Those unzipped skirts reveal a crusting of embroidery on the miniskirt beneath. The same silver foil that heats a weary marathon runner was plaited and woven and plumped with air to create a light-as-thistledown ball-gown skirt, worn with a black velvet sweater licked with glossy black plumes. A black velvet coat swung in movement to reveal that its lining is discreetly—but entirely—encrusted with hand-beaded pink pansy blooms. Perfect chiffon pleats, meanwhile, were trapped over the hips and broke out into fullness below.
Hairstylist Sam McKnight gave Chanel’s Parisian gamines rockabilly forelocks, and the young Coco Chanel herself would have recognized the elegant curving heel of the ankle boots worn with every single look—and often embroidered or embellished to match.
Lagerfeld’s bride—beautifully embodied by Adut Akech—brought up the rear of this Amazon army, wearing pale verdigris tweed. During the fitting its opal gleam seemed a beautiful but unconventional choice for a bride, but as Akech strode out along the runway’s broad “sidewalk” and the brilliant sunlight streaming through the glass dome of the Grand Palais hit the volutes of Lesage embroidery on her jacket, the color—the same as the sturdy but fragile-looking steel filaments that support the building’s glazed roof, as well as the sunlit variants on the boquinistes’ stands—seemed inevitable.
As designers this season struggle to define what the haute couture means for them in 2018—sober classicism à la the Duchess of Sussex, for instance, or a fireworks display of craft and technique—Karl Lagerfeld stands alone. He doesn’t need to send out his girls hobbled by acres of train gathering runway fluff and dust to make a “couture” statement; instead, the brilliant premiers of the Chanel tailoring department carve the shoulders of their second-skin jackets just so, while the flou (or soft dressmaking) ateliers layer 40 meters of chiffon in angelic white or stormy gray at just the right bias to create unencumbering skirts that swirl in movement like clouds scudding across a Parisian sky, creating pure couture magic that sets the bar for perfection very high indeed.
