“It’s nice that the fashion industry is shining a light on this part of the world,” Caroline Sieber said on Monday night at Chanel’s dinner in honor of Karl Lagerfeld, and “here,” of course, was Salzburg, the winsome history-saturated Austrian town made arguably most famous by Robert Wise’s von Trapp family singers in The Sound of Music (and notably for Sieber, less than an hour away from her hometown). Revelers like Rooney Mara (clad in gray, A-line Chanel couture), Caroline de Maigret, and Brad Kroenig, whose son, Hudson, stars in the new Chanel film, had flown in for Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show the following day, and after an afternoon spent wandering the internationally famous Christmas markets and various Mozart-related attractions were glugging glühwein en plein air and discussing the various figure-flattering aspects of traditional Austrian dress before joining guests like Baptiste Giabiconi, Alice Dellal, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Catherine McNeil, and Lindsey Wixson for a six-course traditional Austrian feast (from venison tartare to kaiserschmarrn) and something of an utterly Chanel-ified history lesson.
And history was everywhere at the event, from the locale—St. Peter Stiftskeller, central Europe’s oldest restaurant (founded somewhere around 800 AD), a series of warm, stone-built rooms accessed by a fairy-lit ivy-covered arbor—to the content of Lagerfeld’s latest foray into short film, a teaser for the upcoming collection entitled "Reincarnation," that stars Pharrell Williams and Cara Delevingne as mischievous hotel employees who transform into Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth (“Sisi”) of Austria, respectively, for a combined midnight waltz/duet—and has Geraldine Chaplin reprising her role as Coco Chanel for a patron, n’est-ce pas. “It’s so funny, because the sleeves of my wedding dress were inspired by a portrait of Sisi,” Sieber said of the ill-fated, if famously beautiful monarch, as partygoers’ chat turned to Delevingne’s impressive vocals on the song’s final verse; though it was perhaps her chirped refrain of “CC”—or was it “Sisi?”—that was the most telling.