After Fendi and Chanel, it was clearer than ever this season what Karl Lagerfeld s own collection actually stands for. As he once memorably observed, anything bearing his name is pretty close to how he imagines himself dressing if he were a woman. Unsurprisingly, that meant his Spring offering for Karl Lagerfeld Paris veered between a sveltely structured futurism and a governess-y strictness. A halfway house between dreamland Gattaca and birthplace Hamburg, in other words. The palette said it all: black, white, and a silvery metallic, which flowed over Poppy Delevingne s body like a mercury second skin. The governess? A white blouse with a double bib tucked into a high-waisted black leather skirt suggested the kind of woman who d keep naughty little Karl in check.
That bib with its asymmetry was a recurrent motif throughout the collection, on everything from dresses to leather jackets. Also recurring was a trompe l oeil element: the black jumper dress over the white top, all one piece, or the jewel-buttoned tee under a black gown, also a single garment. And all of it was cut from ultra-light technical fabrics: tech cotton, tech silk, stretch linen, rubber-effect leather for the accessories. The overall impression was a streamlined, monochrome antithesis of the profligate creativity of Lagerfeld s other work as a fashion gun for hire. It will be made even clearer in February, when he opens his own shop in Paris.
