Origami-Style Chanel
” In fashion you are not a fortune teller, you’ve got dead lines otherwise you are dead”
Karl Lagerfeld, January 2009
Karl Lagerfeld, the couturier who recently wrote the epitaph for “bling†and conspicuous consumption, set the tone for arecession luxury in his haute couture collection for Chanel in Paris last week.
Neither a single pearl earring, nor a glimmer of gilt jewelery was allowed to tarnish this Spring/Summer array of clothes as pure as the driven snow.
The models even wore white, paper head-dresses created, in origami-style, by the Tokyo milliner, Kamo, and their nails were painted white.
The clothes, exquisitely-cut, as if with a butter-knife, were mainly in parchment-cream and virgin white a one of a Coco Chanel s favorite colors from the start of her career in the 1920s. An occasional flash of black PVC or smudgy-grey rose-print, lent added sobriety.
The show was staged in a former bank, its columns and ceiling festooned with elaborate white paper flowers and doilies paper is my favorite material, Lagerfeld declared. It was a feast for the shredder or recycling plant.
The British actress, Keira Knightly, the ˜face of Chanel s Coco Mademoiselle perfume, was among the celebrities seated at small tables, covered with paper table-cloths, to watch the show, along with James Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko; Marianne Faithfull; and Anna Mouglalis.
The traditional Chanel cardigan suit was reinterpreted, in tweed, silk and sequins, as a contemporary two- or three-piece; its jacket shrunken to a detachable yoke, its skirt an A-line with inverted pleats or over-panels at the sides.
Feather-light embroideries and beading, as discreet as a Swiss bank account, embellished the graceful evening wear.
“We are entering a phase of reality fashion.” said Lagerfeld. “This is right. This is exactly what Chanel did; she wore the clothes she designed. We talk about the financial crisis, but it is also healthy. People who have been making 20% increase, year after year, and then are not making 20% any more, they are not poor. So don’t cry for them. We have got into bad habits and it is not a bad thing to have a new starting point.”
Lagerfeld was quick to distance himself from the two movies about the life of Coco Chanel, due for release towards the end of this year, one starring Anna Mouglalis, the other Audrey Tatou.
I had nothing to do with them,he said.
He also lambasted the American television production starring Shirley MacLaine as Gabrielle Chanel, saying: She (MacLaine) should have lost 30lbs. Chanel was NEVER fat, even in her eighties
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