Chanel runway 20087/10/2023 From Watteau (Spring/Summer 1985 couture) and Serge Roche (Spring/Summer 1990 ready-to-wear) to hip-hop fly girls (Fall/Winter 1991 ready-to-wear), surfers (Spring/Summer 2003 ready-to-wear) and ancient Egypt (Pre-Fall 2019), Lagerfeld used each season’s inspiration to conceive Chanel’s signatures anew. Lagerfeld’s collections for the brand displayed his knack for synthesizing old and new, high and low. During the late ’60s and ’70s, he refashioned Chloé to reflect the free spirit of the day and, beginning in 1965, joined forces with the Fendi family, taking it from sleepy furrier to fashion’s haute-est stratum.īecause of his track record for reviving and reimagining brands that had grown stagnant, in 1984 Lagerfeld was handed the reins at Chanel, which had been gathering dust since its founder’s heyday. It was an unprecedented way of working in the days when freelance was still a dirty word. As such, Lagerfeld lent his vision to everyone from Loewe and Max Mara to Krizia and Charles Jourdan, nimbly moving among a diverse range of styles. He went on to become the designer of Jean Patou, eventually realizing that his seemingly endless ideas could fuel a career as a designer-for-hire. His design for a coat won him the International Wool Secretariat and landed him a job with the celebrated couturier Pierre Balmain. An outsize, instantly recognizable personality - his ponytail powdered like an 18th-century viscount, his eyes perpetually shielded by dark glasses, wearing fistfuls of chunky silver jewels - Lagerfeld was, above all, an avatar of style.īorn in Hamburg (in 1933, ’35, or ’38 by varying accounts), Karl Lagerfeld packed his bags for Paris in 1954. Vintage Karl Lagerfeld designs for Chanel handbags, evening dresses, coats, jewelry and other clothing and accessories riffed on its iconography - tweed skirt suits, pearls, camellias - accenting a lexicon of Chanel-isms with tastes of the moment.ĭuring his five-decade career as a designer for Chanel, Fendi, Chloé and many others, Lagerfeld was a quintessential chameleon, ever evolving to embody the times. “My life and my job,” the designer once said, “is to forget myself.” From his first collection at Chanel - after joining the brand in the early 1980s - he injected the venerable house with a frisson of modernity. More than a mere tastemaker, Karl Lagerfeld devoted himself to the continual pursuit of chic.
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