Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel was a woman of singular character intelligence and imagination. These attributes enabled her to survive a childhood of deprivation and neglect and reinvent herself to become one of the most influential women of her century. Unlike any previous female couturier, her own life quickly became synonymous with the aspect of more style that made her name. But dress was only the most visible aspect of more profound changes. Gabrielle Chanel would help to bring about. During the course of an extraordinary and unconventional journey- from object poverty to the invention of a new kind of glamour- she helped to forge the idea of modern woman.
Karl Lagerfeld, like Gabrielle Chanel before him believes fashion should encourage an active life. Lagerfeld knows how to play up and down the classic Chanel scale in tune with every season. He cleverly twists the collections so that they each include some element of Chanel. Be it white camellias, quilted bags, austrian doorman’s jackets, pearls, chains or two tone shoes.
Introduced in 2002 as a to show case Chanel’s speciality ateliers, the Metiers d’Art shows feature highly wearable Pre-fall collections that have grown to rival the Fall and Spring offerings among its global audience. For each Metiers d Art collection, Lagerfeld chooses a location tied to a milestone in the life span of the French house. The Paris- Salzburg collection commemorated the trip during the 1950’s that inspired Gabrielle Chanel to create her iconic four- pocket jacket, after seeing the uniform of an elevator operator at the Schloss Mittersill hotel.
The Pre-Fall Metiers d’Art collections are real collections. They are Ready-to- wear couture;they are not pre- collections. These tend to be my favorite ones because they involve a lot of whimsy and fantasy . They are important as our windows. There has to be a story to the clothes. This keeps the Chanel name in a way all over the orld. People look at fashion looks at fashion shows, girls on he runway. These are all modern ways to communicate all the different products Chanel sells.
Karl Lagerfeld has proved himself a master of high low hybrid in this Chanel ensemble from the Versailles Metiers d Art collection. Here formal eighteenth century details, like panniers and fichus, are recreated in casual twenty-first-century fabrics dressed up with forty lace ruffles and cuffs and dressed down with gold platform wedges.
