Chanel / Spring 2012 Couture

Chanel / Spring 2012 Couture

Karl Lagerfeld was in the cockpit. The passengers were seated in the flight simulator, a futuristic cabin constructed in a room somewhere under the roof of the Grand Palais. Cue takeoff for Chanel’s spring haute couture: a collection made in blue—154 shades of it, to be precise. Why blue? The sky, of course, in all its infinite changeability. “It’s the color of air, no?” announced Captain Karl, once the “flight” had landed and the audience was disembarking. “It’s the most becoming color. And I’m bored with the red carpet—so why not a blue carpet?” Karl has a new blue-eyed Burmese cat, too. And recently, he said, he’s been looking at the jewels the artist Suzanne Valadon owned, studded with blue chalcedony.

But this wasn’t a collection that needed any explanation to validate it or, truth be told, even such an elaborately (and wittily) constructed set to put it in context. The clothes—from the simple, chic color-blocked dresses, to the treatments of Chanel tweeds,  to the long, skinny dresses—simply spoke for themselves, with no too-obvious puns or tropes about air travel to obscure the beautiful view.

The show opened with clean, supple day dresses bisected with deep bands as stand-away collars and, at the hip, a second inset band at the hip, containing pockets into which the girls thrust their hands as they walked. It was a gesture of ease which called to mind Coco Chanel’s own habitual stance, creating a long-waisted framework for Lagerfeld to work variations in the proportions throughout. To begin, shorter dresses sometimes picked up a flippy volume in the skirt, like a lovely swing of pale-blue duchesse satin beneath a beaded navy dress and short jacket. Then the silhouettes became longer and slimmer: rigorous ankle-length coatdresses, a sequence of narrow skirts slit at the side, the attenuated proportions all emphasized by airy, ballooning sleeves on cropped jackets.

Cohesive and rigorous as the theme was, this was also a collection that demonstrated Chanel haute couture decoration and embellishment to the fullest extent, running from winking crystals and glints of Lurex in chic evening suits, to chunky crystalline embroidery on cocktail dresses with “winged” organza wraps, to slithery all-over paillettes. The variety encompassed something for every age and multiple tastes, from the pretty ingénue dress to the grown-up evening suit for the sophisticate. Karl is one couturier fully in control of every calibration of eveningwear imaginable. Chanel may be flying at the most rarefied of heights at this level, but the very sight of it was truly uplifting.

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