Chanel keeps it cool with a Paris street scene

And so to the Chanel show at couture fashion week in which we saw a humble Parisian street scene – a sweeping boulevard lined with bouquinistes and one of those huge domed buildings they specialise in here reconstructed inside Le Grand Palais.

Would it not have been more economical to do it in an actual Parisian street, the averagely competent accountant may ask. Well, yes. But A) That is not the point; B) Le Grand Palais, the grandest, dome-iest edifice has become a de facto home away from home for all of Chanel’s shows and C) A real street would not be air-conditioned.

Watching a Chanel show on a warm summer’s day is always a stretch, because tweed is central to the brand’s cortex, which makes life tricky for the models, A) B) & C) notwithstanding. But the cleverness of Chanel’s design team, headed up, for almost four decades, by Karl Lagerfeld, is to constantly reinvent the medium.

Zips were the big idea here, and bifurcated not just sleeves, but the torsos of jackets, accentuating waists, or ran down the sides of slim tweed skirts, which allowed for maximum movement. At night, micro underskirts came in embellished velvets or sequins, winking beneath black chiffon pleated dresses or peaking through puffy, quilted, feather-trimmed metallic skirts.

If it’s all sounding a bit peculiar, that’s because Lagerfeld, at 84, is still pushing boundaries. But it worked.

Fresh, interesting and more often than not, chic.

Karl Lagerfeld, the designer, appears with Hudson Kroenig and other models at the end of his show for Chanel in Paris, complete with a street scene featuring bouquinistes, the fold-up book stalls still seen along the Seine