Chanel Fall 2016
Paris Fashion Week presented Karl Lagerfeld Chanel couture Fall 2016 collection.
Chanel house on Rue Cambon along with their dummies, sewing machines, cutting tables, fabrics, embroidery materials, canvas toiles, every specialist tool of the trade to the Grand Palais, and asked them to carry on working as usual in their transplanted environment. In the old days, Coco Chanel invited her audience to shows in her house, but this time the house came to the audience.
Front row were, Will Smith and his daughter, Jessica Chastain.
First speculating outfit was no art installation, Broadway set, or movie production, viewing the models, with their piled-up curly hair, their cropped tweed wide-leg pantsuits, and their extraordinarily wide, yet flatly squared-off shoulders in profile.
The most fascinating atelier craftspeople sewing and embroidering turned out to be the best angle on the collection, as it was all down to the silhouette of those shoulders, the cool proportions of the kitten-heeled, ankle-hugging black suede boots under the cropped wide pants, and the low-swooping belled skirt shapes of the duchesse satin dresses that came later.
Naked-eye viewing of such feats as Chanel’s floriform embroidery, overlapping paillettes, and embedded strands of emerald and ruby stones can’t be rivaled by what digital technology is capable of recording. Chan in the 3-D experience made a huge development of these clothes is done in the round.
Karl Lagerfeld’s sketches, canvas toiles recording the internal structures of dresses and jackets, charts of fabric samples, the paper printouts of jewelry that are moved around on patterns while the embroidery-placement decisions are being made.
