Grand Palais in Paris transformed into a winter wonderland for late designer’s last catwalk collection
At Paris fashion week, there was only one show in town. Karl Lagerfeld’s final collection, designed shortly before his death last month, was both Chanel catwalk show and a moment at which the fashion world said goodbye to the designer.
There was a painted backdrop of bright blue sky inside the Grand Palais, transformed for this show into Tyrolean village of 12 Alpine chalets. As always with Lagerfeld’s Chanel shows, a set had been realised with movie-location precision. Each chalet had carved shutters, lace curtains and wooden balconies. Smoke drifted from chimneys, and powdery snow banked in drifts against the long rows of wooden benches, settling on the birch and pine trees dotted between.
The picture-perfect scene set a mood that was celebratory rather than mournful. Claudia Schiffer wore a cream blouse embroidered with camellias, the house flower; Anna Wintour a pale pink bouclé suit. Lagerfeld, who never liked to admit to feeling unwell – it was one of the many things he considered common – detested funerals. “I just want to disappear like the animals in the virgin forest. It is awful to encumber people with your remains,” he told French television four years ago.
On each of the 2,658 seats for this show was a gift of Chanel No 19 fragrance, a bottle of classic Rouge Noir nail polish, and a reproduction of Lagerfeld’s sketch of himself walking side by side with Coco Chanel, inscribed “The Beat Goes On”. The house of Chanel intends to hold a memorial event for Lagerfeld, although neither details nor date are known. Meanwhile, the message is that Karl may be gone, but Chanel lives on.
The show began with a minute of silence, brought to an end by a recording of Lagerfeld holding court on the art of the fashion show. The doors of Chalet Gardenia opened, and out strutted Cara Delevingne in wide windowpane-checked wool trousers with matching silk skirt and trilby, under a tweed houndstooth coat. The theme of the collection was chalet chic; the mood was the irrepressibly bumptious power-dressing that Lagerfeld perfected at Chanel in the 1980s and never strayed far from.