![]() “When Lagerfeld took over the Chanel collections, they had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel,” said former fashion editor Marian McEvoy, in a 1992 profile of Lagerfeld for Vanity Fair magazine.Īdmirers encouraged him. Lagerfeld reshaped her ideas according to current fashion tastes and added details plucked from the constantly changing trends of the moment. The modern dress style that Chanel created for women had hardly changed when she died in 1971. He kept the essential ingredients that Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel had put in place soon after she opened her Paris salon in the 1920s but rearranged them in startling new ways. Lagerfeld was appointed chief designer of the house in 1982 and quickly worked out a blueprint for change. On Tuesday, Chanel announced that Virginie Viard - Lagerfeld’s closest collaborator for decades - would be his successor. Lagerfeld designed clothes as different as the companies he worked with - but nowhere more successfully than at Chanel. While leading designers of his generation, notably his contemporary Yves Saint Laurent, created a fashion look that became identified with their name. Lagerfeld, one of the era’s most respected and daring designers who transformed the French luxury brand into a world power of style, died Tuesday. “If you want to ruin a business, be respectful,” Lagerfeld told Vogue magazine in 2004. ![]() Evening dresses were paired with Chanel biker boots. Two-tone beige and black pumps got platform heels. The quilted-leather Chanel bag became a backpack. The long strands of pearls mixed with gold chains that were a Chanel signature grew into five times as many layers. So, in Lagerfeld’s hands, a traditional Chanel suit with cardigan jacket and straight skirt suddenly had an untraditional miniskirt or hot pants. He figured he had nothing to lose by shaking things up. He brought it into the 21st century with new materials and fabric innovation, introducing leather and lurex, sequins and feathers, denim, rubber, and even cement to his versions of the classic jacket! Lagerfeld’s boundless imagination turned Mademoiselle Chanel’s creation into a worldwide object of desire.Chanel was a faded fashion empire when Karl Lagerfeld arrived to see if he could pump life back into the tired brand. He transformed it by playing with proportion and volume by cropping its length or expanding its shoulder. Lagerfeld took the elements introduced by Gabrielle Chanel, and for the next 35 years would constantly reinterpret her jacket, injecting it with elegance and humor while retaining the modern spirit with which it was created. In 1983, a dozen years after the passing of Mademoiselle Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld was named the head of the house, and solidified the CHANEL jacket's icon status. ![]() The lining mirrored this same construction, as Chanel herself would say, “the inside should match the outside.” As for embellishment, the four-pocket design often included braided-trim along the edges and cuffs, jewel-like buttons (often mirroring CHANEL iconography: a lion’s head, a camellia, a sheath of wheat, a double C…) and interior chain detailing along the hem included on every jacket to ensure the perfect drop, hang, and swing.īut how did these elements which make a CHANEL jacket so revolutionary also serve in making a CHANEL jacket so alluring? Enter Karl Lagerfeld. The sleeve was slimly cut and set high on the shoulder to optimize comfort and movement. Her jackets were straight and structured, almost boxy and devoid of any darting, with a single seam down the center-back. While retrospectively modest when they were introduced in 1925, Gabrielle Chanel’s first tweed suits, set the groundwork for what we have now come to instantly recognize as a CHANEL jacket today. With this in mind, Gabrielle turned her attentions to tweed-and the fabric, which at the time was used only in menswear, soon became her signature. She was said to have often borrowed the clothes of her lover, the Duke of Westminster, because she felt drawn to the ease and comfort they provided. ![]() In the mid-1920s Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel started working with tweed for her womenswear. This belief led Mademoiselle Chanel to create her first tweed suits, and in turn, the iconic CHANEL jacket. Born from the desire to liberate women from the restrictive sartorial norms of the day (not the least among them, the regular use of a corset), French designer Gabrielle Chanel sought to dress women “in suits that make them feel at ease," she once said, "but that still emphasize femininity.” An idea which now seems simple, and yet 100 years ago was the start of a fashion revolution.
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