Chanel Resort 2016
Karl s in Korea for cruise. An extravagant, exuberant event cementing the relationship between Chanel and its Seoul sisters culminated with a graceful cross-cultural compliment: a fragile semi-sheer two-tone pink linen hanbok dress with a wide black ribbon tied in a bow. “You know, it is made in a special linen patchwork technique, which was done here because no one else can make it,” remarked Lagerfeld at the end of a collection that rounded up his impressions of Korea, from K-pop to traditional dress. Had he studied it all online before coming? Nothing too deeply, he insisted. “I only have to see a little to do a lot! We were not into temples!”
He d picked the curvy, cavernous Dongdaemun Design Plaza, an art exhibition and performance space designed by Zaha Hadid, for a playfully themed entertainment that spilled beyond fashion and into an epic Chanel spectacle involving an air-lifting of hundreds of foreign guests—Gisele Bündchen, Kristen Stewart, Isabelle Huppert, and Tilda Swinton included—into Seoul. Soo Joo Park, the bleach-blonde Korean-American model who walked in the show, was ecstatic to see her hometown lit up with the attention. “And I’ve been spending so much time in the fittings with Karl, drawing him, and Choupette!” (Yes, Choupette came, too).
Chanel’s sampling of the high-energy, happy vibe of South Korea s fashion-obsessed youth culture was translated into a vast white set decorated with primary-colored dots, shiny plastic stools in a thicket of lamps on poles. The immersive synthetic hyperreal environment—a sensation something like being inside a computer-generated 22nd-century K-pop video—created the perfect scenery for looking at the clothes and watching the other key players in the crowds of young and pretty Koreans dressed to the nines in Chanel.
What, then, might Chanel s Asian fans relate to by the time the collection drops? Lagerfeld might not have gone into costume history literally, but there were plenty of Korean threads woven into the collection. The echoes were there in the raised-waist shapes, which produced short smock dresses (a particularly pretty black-and-white frilled organza one turned heads), in the spectacular embroidered eveningwear, patterned to echo the mother-of-pearl and gold marquetry of antique Korean wedding chests, and in the patchwork theme that played from prints through to the gauzy linen collages—an old technique that looks surprisingly minimal-modernist.
What next? After this night s cultural exchange, a good portion of the guests are about to load themselves onto flights to Palm Springs, off to see Louis Vuitton s show, leg two of the fashion summer odyssey that the resort collections have suddenly morphed into. Whatever Vuitton has planned for Wednesday, the ante s definitely been upped.
