One hundred fifty shades of blue. Obviously, everyone is going to jump on that extraordinary stat from Chanel s Couture show today. Why blue? Karl Lagerfeld is too much of a polymath to nail any one reason for anything he does, but he s a wicked player of word association games. Elvis "Blue Moon," Miles Kind of Blue, blue-sky optimism…"Anything but the blues," he said post-show. "I don t have the blues."
Hardly. The vision presented by the Chanel show was streamlined, upbeat, and forward-looking, quite the contrast with the decadent-Raj, drowned-world, and scorched-earth scenarios that Lagerfeld arranged around his most recent collections. Today s guests took their seats in a simulacrum of a commercial space shuttle flight that, during the course of the show, left the Earth s atmosphere and headed for space. Toward the finale, the Earth actually passed overhead, across the clear dome that allowed passengers a view of the starry sky outside.
But the collection was scarcely the futurist extravaganza that such a setup promised. The key point in the presentation was a new fashion attitude. It s the sort of lip service notion to which designers often tip their caps, but in Lagerfeld s case, he delivered. How? By elongating his proportion even lower than dropped waist to thigh-top, so that when the models walked with their hands tucked in slash pockets, they looked, the designer said, "like boys whose jeans are slipping off." The boy/girl thing is a Chanel staple, and Lagerfeld has found a contemporary exemplar in Alice Dellal, who today was placed in the peculiar position of watching dozens of women styled to look just like her parading past her front-row perch. Think of stretched-out necks and pushed-up sleeves on sweatshirts and you ve got other key components of the silhouette.
The youthful slouchiness of the attitude was a counterpoint to the byzantine complexity of the techniques that created the clothes. "A lot of it isn t even fabric," Lagerfeld said. "It s embroidery." And if it wasn t that, it was cellophane. Or something else unlikely. And yet, there was a classic elegance about the result. The stretched-out neck was a portrait neckline, the pushed-up sleeves were a perfect bell. The long, lean length that ended just above the ankle was culture incarnate. And the cellophane shimmered like the finest silk.
