With the magnificent setting of the 10 B.C. Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the backdrop for Chanel’s latest Métiers d’Art show, Karl Lagerfeld was thinking of a chic mash-up of Ancient Egypt and New York itself. The collection was designed to showcase the small miracles wrought by the house’s fournisseurs. These embroiderers, feather workers, button-makers, costume jewelers, fabric weavers, milliners, and shoemakers are flourishing anew thanks to Chanel’s taking their once waning ateliers and supporting them under the company’s Paraffection subsidiary.
To set the scene, the moat that surrounds the temple in the museum’s dedicated gallery had been planted with thickets of papyrus, the structure itself partially hidden from the view of guests by a high temporary wall to create a more dramatic sense of arrival to this most storied of Manhattan landmarks, albeit a relatively recent implant. (In 1963 the temple was removed from its site in the flood plain that would soon be created by the Aswan Dam and subsequently gifted to the United States by the Egyptian government in recognition of the help provided in rescuing it and other monuments threatened in the same way.)
Lagerfeld opened the show with variations on the super-scale jackets he first presented at Chanel’s Spring 2019 ready-to-wear show, but this time he cut the skirts to rise slightly in front in imitation of the shendyt, or wrap-around kilted skirt, worn by men in Ancient Egypt and so familiar from the period’s hieroglyphs. In a further nod to the period, he layered these suits over slim, ankle-length sheath dresses of ivory gauze, like the kalasiris worn by Cleopatra and her ladies. Those famous Chanel tweeds were flecked with lustrous gold—Lagerfeld, who can never resist a play on words, called it luxe or to sound like the storied city on the Nile. And in another antic play on words, he indulged in some prints and motifs drawn from the Memphis Group, the 1980s artist and designer collective headed by the protean Ettore Sottsass and named for the ancient Egyptian city, whose work Lagerfeld himself commissioned and collected back in the day.
Added to the palette of gold and ivory were coral and scarab blue—and scarabs themselves appeared in jewels and in giant form as evening minaudières. The alligator and python effects in this collection were also trompe l’oeil: They are now created from stamped leather or even from scale-shaped discs of sparkle; Chanel announced on the eve of the show that the brand will no longer be working with crocodile and exotic reptile and stingray skins.
Those Flash Gordon shoulders were dramatic enough to read from one side of the temple to the other, but the real work of the métiers d’art is best examined up close and personal. Those nubbly tweeds? Woven from strips of tulle, sequin, and metallic ribbon. That mesh-like net fabric? A trellis of microscopic golden beads worked by hand. Those elaborate knits? Encrusted with paillettes of lapis and gold in imitation of the Ancient Egyptian necklaces that can be seen at the Met right now in the exhibition “Jewelry: The Body Transformed” (through February 24, 2019).
As Lagerfeld knows well, Egypt has cast a spell over fashion designers for centuries, most notably in the years immediately following Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922, miraculously filled with the treasures that were intended to guide the monarch (who died at the tender age of 18) to the afterlife. The period’s fashion and fine jewelry designers went mad for all things Egyptian. Lagerfeld nodded to those with some Deco Egyptian detailing, and also sent out a thoroughly 2019 homage to that beautiful boy king in the beautiful boy king persona of Pharrell Williams (see Look 40, with its trompe l’oeil gorgerine necklace cleverly worked into the knit). Then he seemed to riff on the Bangles’s 1986 hit “Walk Like an Egyptian,” with a slew of prints evoking the mean streets of Alphabet City and the New York subway during that decade, exuberantly reimagined by the contemporary French graffiti artist Cyril Kongo—latter-day hieroglyphs you might say, and typical of the connections that Lagerfeld makes in his febrile imaginings. Thirty-five years ago, his fellow design icon Andrée Putman told Vogue of Lagerfeld that “every day he’s adding facets, thanks to his galloping curiosity and his cultural bulimia.” Lagerfeld was then on the eve of debuting his Chanel haute couture collection for the house that he would soon transform into a global mega-brand as revolutionary as the one that Gabrielle Chanel herself created in the aftermath of the First World War—and his galloping curiosity, as this collection made abundantly clear, hasn’t stopped since.
