A giant ice storm made getting to the city more than a little difficult,
but by 6:30 on Tuesday evening, nine hundred guests had poured into Dallas'
Fair Park, home of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition and a National
Historic Landmark. Inside, they were greeted by a built-to-fit drive-in
movie theater complete with seventy-four restored vintage automobiles
parked in front of four giant screens. This reporter watched Lagerfeld's
short film from the front seat of a red convertible Chevrolet Chevelle.
The Return stars Geraldine Chaplin as a wary yet still brazen
Coco on the eve of her 1954 show, the one that was celebrated by the
Americans and panned by the French
"you can hardly call that couture,"
says Arielle Dombasle in the movie.
"I don't think her name will last
forever."
Karl Lagerfeld
rocked Texas when he brought the sensational Chanel
Métiers d’Art fashion show titled 'Paris - Dallas' to Dallas’s Fair Park, an imposing complex
of Deco Moderne buildings and sculptures built for the 1936 Texas
Centennial. The peripatetic Metiers shows that have also
taken place in the
Scottish Highlands,
Versailles,
among many others, are designed to showcase the unique craftsmanship of the
ateliers that the House of Chanel has acquired to preserve in recent
years so the workmanship is sensational. (As Karl explained, Chanel has
just added a leather company for its portfolio that includes the storied
embroidery house of
Lesage, the costume jeweler
Desrues, the plumassier
Lemarié, custom shoemaker
Massaro, and milliner
Maison Michel, among
others.)
“The details are what I love,” said Karl, and what details!
They
could be studied up close and personal during fittings on the eve of
the show. There was something more than a little surreal about seeing
Karl Lagerfeld’s entire rue Cambon Chanel team (including his elegant,
white-jacketed butler serving the maestro Coke Zero) transplanted to a
large room at Dallas’s Rosewood Mansion at Turtle Creek, decked out with
festive holiday wreaths and garlands, but Karl was in his element. He
had been feted in the state during his days as the powerhouse designer
at Chloé (and was about to join Gabrielle Chanel
in receiving the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the
Field of Fashion, the formidable Coco came to Dallas in 1957 to accept
hers from Stanley Marcus himself).
“I like Texas and I like Texan
people,” Karl pronounced, as Erin Wasson made herself right at home she
is Dallas born and raised, after all. (
“She and Lynn Wyatt are my
favorite Texan girls,” said Karl.)
Meanwhile, Laetitia Crahay was
busy garlanding the girls with ropes of Chanel pearls looped like
Native American lariats, or classic Chanel chains threaded with strips
of stone-washed denim or cotton printed like cowboy bandanas; and with
witty rhinestone pistol brooches firing glittering gardenia blossoms
(droll Karl touches also included purses fashioned like oil barrels, or
old-fashioned holsters, to hold a cell phone, or a bottle of No. 5).
Hairdresser
Sam McKnight speared the girls’ hair with quills from the
storied feather house of Lemarié that had been elaborately appliquéd
with a marquetry of contrast-colored patches, and positioned low-crowned
Stetson hats by Maison Michel on their heads. These were inspired by
those from the Civil War era.
“I think that’s much chicer than the
saloon stuff, no?” queried Karl (
“That’s for spaghetti Westerns,”
sniffed Lady Amanda Harlech).
“Never use anything the way it is
meant to be used,” added Karl, pointing out the elaborate motifs of a
classic cowboy boot that he had blown large and used for sweater designs
or as the Lesage embroidery motifs on a slinky black velvet evening
dress. Those motifs were used at the knee of second-skin boots that fit
like gloves or for even closer-fitting cowboy boots that turned out to
be trompe l’oeil–printed hose worn with shoes that resembled chopped-off
boots, with the double-linked Chanel
C branded into the chunky wooden heels and classic chased-metal tips in a dull gold. (The same tone that makeup artist
Peter Philips used to accent the girls’ cheeks.)
There
was much sophisticated textile and texture play, too. Knitwear pieces,
in stripes that evoked Chanel’s famed 1920s jersey fabrics, were
laminated on the outside to resemble shiny leather. A classic jean
jacket was actually made from scalloped tiers of denim, like fish
scales, and wool cowgirl skirts were as elaborately woven and fringed as
1960s textile wall-art tapestries.
There was classic Chanel,
too, in a suit of soft beige jersey (
“Chanel, in her heyday in the
twenties, was the queen of beige, before she made her little black
dress,” explained Karl) that had a gentle swing to the jacket and the
skirt, with its vertical pockets hidden in the unpressed pleats in the
front.
“It’s a vague copy of the one Chanel wore when she came here in
’57,” explained Karl of Coco’s Neiman Marcus trip, when the steers at
the rodeo she was taken to were garlanded with
Chanel-esque pearls.
Pale
Chanel chiffon blouses in extraordinary combinations of origami pleats
and ruffles (flourished with what Karl called a “scorpion bow,”
fashioned from two layers of black satin were paired with those pale denim pieces or swinging midi-length
skirts of black leather with a texture carved like cowboy boots.
“Its
Millicent Rogers in Taos [New Mexico],” explained Karl, citing the
legendary heiress and tastemaker whose prophetic passion for Native
American textiles and jewelry made her a prototypical hippie in the
’40s. That Millicent Rogers look manifested itself in sweeping
blanket-pattern knit stoles and ponchos, and skirts with fringing that
was painstakingly embroidered by Lesage. Lesage was also responsible for
a sensational ballet-length evening dress and bolero solid with sequin
stars of red, midnight blue, and silver, a Texan transformation of Coco
Chanel’s famous star-spangled night-sky evening gowns from the 1930s.
In
the runway show, set in a breathtaking nineteenth-century rodeo set,
Caroline de Maigret made a dramatic bride, her proud cheekbones
reflecting her Native American grandmother’s genes, framed with a
feather headdress of ivory plumes tipped with pale pink. The local ladies of Dallas and Houston were
en extase. “I’ve
never been so proud to be a Texan,” enthused Becca Cason Thrash.
“Leave
it to a German who works for a Paris house to bring Texas back!”
Selections by ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories
Photos: Courtesy of CHANEL
More CHANEL To Love ...
'From the washed and
crumpled luxe silk failles to the woven and embroidered fabrics so
elaborately built up that they resembled multimedia artworks.
“It’s
inspired by kinetic art,” Karl Lagerfeld of this show that was
multilayered conceptually, and literally. This meant not only layered
garments boxy, tweedy day suits worn with broad hip-slung belts and with
another band of suede underskirt showing several inches below the skirt
hem, matched to the second-skin “stocking” boots...'
