Paris Fashion Week: Chanel proves fashion is fine art with a gallery style presentation for Spring 2014
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Photography by Peter Stigter
Chanel Spring 2014
Fine art has been a trend here at Paris Fashion Week Spring 2014, but leave it to Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld to take the theme far beyond where anyone else dared. He turned the Grand Palais into a giant art gallery, where each piece on display had some reference to the creations of Mademoiselle Coco as well as real works of art.
There was an installation of two oversized Chanel 2.55 bags, one on the wall, one on the floor that guests carrying similar bags took selfies in. One canvas had a door marked Mademoiselle Prive, while another was painted with black bars echoing the trim on Chanel’s classic boucle jackets. There was also a giant Chanel No. 5 bottle with robot arms and legs.
The show will give art buffs stories to dine out on for weeks. For the rest, so will the clothes. Many referenced the world of fine art with brushstroke prints on silk, graffiti totes and backpacks and eye makeup that looked straight off a colour wheel. Mademoiselle’s signatures were there too, with pearls spilling over shoulders and down sleeves, fringy boucle suits, and camellia knits torqued to expose one shoulder.
One of the art pieces was a tilted upper portion of a marblelized Chanel No 5 bottle titled, simply, Unsinkable. At 80+ years old, Lagerfeld might as well have been talking about himself.
Bernadette Morra is the former editor-in-chief of FASHION magazine. She has been covering the Canadian and international fashion scenes for more than 30 years, first at The Toronto Star, then at FASHION. Over her long career Bernadette has interviewed many fashion world legends including Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Gianni Versace.
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