Midas touch: Lagerfeld presents his vision of Ancient Greece
Nymph, goddess and shepherdress all have their place here
It may be a drizzly grey day in Paris, but Karl Lagerfeld turned an upstairs room of the Grand Palais into a tiny corner of Greece. The sun (or at least some very bright lights) shone onto tumbled stone pillars planted with Mediterranean flowers and terracotta walls painted with dancing nymphs. It was all in honour of Chanel’s 2017/18 Cruise Collection, but was there some hidden meaning in all this? A statement of pro-EU solidarity? A comment on the upcoming French elections? Brexit? No. “Reality is of no interest to me,” the designer said. “My Greece is an idea.”
This was a modest show by Chanel standards: last season the French luxury house virtually took over Havana, Cuba, for its Cruise show, and for its autumn/winter collection, it installed a gigantic fake rocket in the main hall of the Grand Palais, amid showers of fireworks and huge columns of dry ice. But that doesn’t make the show less important, especially in an age of Snapchat attention spans.
“Catwalk shows are the beginning of everything,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s President of Fashion. “It’s the first time everyone sees the collection. Our job is to create stories for people to tell. Whether they’re doing that on Instagram in the UK or WeChat in China. We have to find new ways to talk to our customers on new channels. It’s a lot of work. It’s more work, in fact, but it’s made us much more agile.”
So this was Ancient Greece for a generation of influencers: shepherdesses gambolled in cream knitted mini-dresses with fringed hems and rope-tied waists with gladiator sandals criss-crossing up to the knee. Nymphs wore calf-length white dresses appliqued with wave motifs, or draped mini dresses in coral or sky blue.
There were goddesses too, resplendent in white wide-legged jumpsuits in with lots of gold accessories: belts, braided headbands, multitudes of necklaces — and the upper arm is now a good place to wear a serpent bracelet, depending on the state of your upper arms of course. White and black 50s-bombshell swimsuits with transparent rain capes, gold-embellished sunglasses, and flowing silk robes printed with golden laurel crowns were ideal for lounging on the deck of an Onassis yacht. There were ancient warrior influences too, in box-pleated skirts with jewelled breastplates. It was all so flattering there would be no need to apply a filter before posting. “It’s about being able to play,” explained Pavlovsky.
As for the state of French politics, Brexit and the exchange rate between the pound and the Euro, whilst La ger feld, serene on his Olympus, can ignore it all Pavlov sky doesn’t. “In the end, Brexit or no, we will still continue to do good business in the UK. For us, it’s just not good to see people being less rich. That’s not good wherever it happens, in the UK, in Europe or the US. When we see a currency go down, it’s not good news.” But for now, Chanel continues to have a Midas touch.