‘Only Karl can do this’: Lagerfeld blends Egypt and Manhattan for Chanel
When Coco Chanel visited New York in 1931, the Chicago Daily Tribune noted that she arrived with two assistants, three maids, 15 trunks and 35 additional pieces of luggage. Eighty-seven years later, the house she founded still travels in style.
On Tuesday the Metropolitan Museum of Art rolled out the red carpet for Chanel and hosted its first fashion show in three decades, turning the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing into a catwalk for Karl Lagerfeld’s Metiers d’Art collection.
Chanel aligns itself with icons wherever it goes. When Lagerfeld is in New York, the city’s grandest museum becomes a catwalk, and the show is advertised all over the city; posters depict Coco as the Statue of Liberty, sporting a spiked crown with her little tweed suit, flaming torch aloft.
The Chanel brand lays claim to a mass culture bandwidth – as big as Disney, as bold as Coca Cola – while retaining a high culture price tag.
This week the brand became the latest fashion giant to ban the use of exotic skin and fur. “It has become increasingly difficult to source exotic skins that match our ethical standards,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. “Meanwhile we are investing a lot in research and development, and the innovations in alternative materials that are happening in our ateliers are phenomenal.”
What looked like crocodile on the catwalk at the Met was in fact mock croc; what looked like lizard was vegan pineapple leather. Metiers d’art is a fashion genre unique to Chanel, devised to showcase the craftmanship of the 26 specialist ateliers owned by Chanel, from embroidery and featherwork to
glovemaking and pleating.
The clothes are demi-couture: intensively hand-worked but sold on the shop floor rather than made to order in the pure tradition of haute couture. The messaging of Metiers d’Art is to remind the world of the sophistication and savoir-faire of Chanel.
The power play of staging a blowthe-budget fashion show in a landmark museum is blunt. But Lagerfeld’s genius is in adding sufficient nuance to make a blockbuster interesting, and finding visual synergies that make his