Chanel Spring-Summer Couture

Wow, what a dress. (photos from WWD)

I'm writing this post because I wanted to look at that dress – a wondrous mix of midnight blues sparkling and shimmering over the body like the summer ocean at night under a full moon. And notice the slouchy low pockets which add a casual ease to an incredibly expensive dress. This dress is a simple shape which follows the lines of the body but glitters with sublime color and decoration – just beautiful.

Karl Lagerfeld presented the Chanel Spring-Summer 2012 Haute Couture collection in Paris this week. The entire collection was in shades of blue which is my favorite color. Additionally, the show was presented at the Grand Palais in a set which had been specially built to represent the inside of a...wait for it...luxury airliner. The airliner was made out of anodized aluminum and took five days to build inside the Grand Palais. The interior included 250 first class seats. A drinks cart circulated and fake clouds floated by the windows. At the end of the show, Lagerfeld, who turns 79 this year, emerged from the cockpit which was complete with glowing dials. I mean really, that sounds like a lot of fun.

This looks like a dress that Coco Chanel herself wore.

The stones on the dress below glow with a greenish tinge.

Lagerfeld told a journalist that he wanted the low pockets to look "like boys whose jeans are falling off." I love the idea of bringing that boyish attitude into the couture. It's what you call French insouciance.

Gumball-size stones decorate this short dress.

Chanel has been mounting recently some amazing fashion shows in the Grand Palais. For the Spring-Summer 2012 ready-to-wear collection, the all white collection was set "under the sea." Models who had pearls on their face and in their hair, walked past giant white choral, and English sensation Florence Welch emerged from a big clam shell to sing her hit "What the Water Gave Me."

Click on the image below to watch the entire couture show. Don't miss Karl emerging from the cockpit at the end. After, click on Fashion Shows to watch other Chanel shows including the Spring-Summer ready-to-wear with the performance by Florence Welch. Don't you love the internet?

Coco & Igor

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen as Igor Stravinsky and French actress Anna Mouglalis as Coco Chanel.

TD and I are now enjoying a beautiful week at the beach but before we left New York last week I had the chance to see the movie Coco & Igor, which recounts the short love affair between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. My most popular and most visited post is about Coco Chanel, and I also enjoyed writing about the movie Coco Before Chanel, so I was looking forward to seeing this movie. Neatly, this movie starts exactly where Coco Before Chanel ends, so they offer continuing stories. Directed by the Dutch-born French director Jan Kounen, and with French sub-titles, Coco & Igor begins in 1913 with Chanel attending the world premier of The Rite of Spring, the revolutionary ballet from the Ballets Russes dance company, with music by Russian composer Stravinsky and choreography by Nijinsky.

You may remember that I previously wrote about the Ballets Russes, so it was fun to see in this movie its impresario Serge Diaghilev nervously pacing along with Stravinsky and Nijinsky before the curtain goes up on the premier in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. What follows is a long extraordinary scene, with the camera swooping over the entire theater, showing how the audience dressed in black tie and elaborate Paul Poiret finery reacts to the discordant, avant garde piece. First there is booing and catcalling, then fist fights break out and finally the police are called in to quell the riot. Of course the Rite of Spring would become a seminal work of art of the twentieth century but at the time it was almost beyond comprehension. Throughout the riot, Chanel sits in the audience looking as if she is fully understands the visionary piece.
Soon Chanel invites the impecunious Stravinsky and his wife and three children to live in her villa outside Paris. There the composer works on revisions for a new production of The Rite of Spring, and, predictably, these two forces of nature begin an affair.

Hanky panky on the piano bench.

The style of Chanel's house and clothes is a pleasure to take in. Everything is elegant black and white – no, it's cream actually. Stravinksy's wife asks Chanel if she likes any colors and the couturier answers, "As long as it's black." Someone in the movie observes that Chanel "makes even grief look chic." Throughout she wears t-strap high heels which is such a flattering shoe. In the very first scene of the movie, Chanel says, "I want to breathe" as she cuts the corset she is wearing with scissors, symbolizing how she freed women from the uncomfortable fashions of the time with her natural designs that followed the lines of the body. Later in the movie she is shown working on a dress in her salon, cutting away at it until she remarks, "There – a strong clean line."

It makes you want to go home and edit your closet.
Stravinksy wears a lot of band collar shirts and vests – I like that look.

At one point Chanel travels to Grasse in the south of France and works on the formula for her new perfume with the Russian perfumer Ernest Beaux. He shows her five samples, and she chooses the fifth so she names it Chanel No 5; we know now that it becomes the bestselling fragrance of all time.

The affair with the composer progresses until Stravinsky's wife and children become aware of it, creating a sad and unhappy situation. During an argument Chanel and Stravinsky fight about who is more powerful: "You are not an artist, Coco," says Stravinsky, "You are a shopkeeper." I think he is wrong here: Chanel was an artist and her medium was clothes. But that is the end of that affair.
It's a pleasure to live in the era for the length of the movie, and I didn't quite want it to end: "Please, just one more scene." There is a funny bit about Diaghilev when Chanel walks into his office to see a young man stark naked with his back to the camera facing Diaghilev. "You can go now," Diaghilev says to the boy, and to Chanel: "I'm interviewing for a new secretary." The last scenes show Chanel and Stravinsky in old age: she is in her suite at the Ritz in Paris and he is at the Essex House in New York City where he died in 1971 – they are still thinking of each other.
Anna Mouglalis plays Chanel throughout as regal, cold, and imperious, gliding through the rooms of her villa with little emotion.

Chanel with Diaghilev on the left.
After the movie was over, I was questioning that portrayal of Chanel. Even from clips you see of Chanel on tv, she is scrappy and garrulous, fast with the quips and quick to lose her temper. I think Chanel was more hot than cold, but that is my observation. Maybe some one who knew Chanel could tell us! In any case, I did the enjoy the movie very much and recommend it to anyone who loves beautiful things.

Chanel Resort 2010

Style.com reports that the new Chanel Resort collection was shown last week in Venice. Three hundred guests sat in wooden deck chairs on the Lido as waves lapped the shore. Karl Lagerfeld's collection was inspired by Venice in the earlier part of the last century. Style.com says that beginning in 1919, Coco Chanel visited Venice for almost ten years and there met Diaghilev, the creator of the brilliant Ballet Russe dance company. The clothes in the collection are a poetic rendering of the period but are modern too. I love clothes that don't really have a specific era -- that go back in time and can be worn in any period, and that's what Lagerfeld accomplished beautifully here. Navy blue and white has always been a favorite; once I had a great navy blue striped long-sleeved French sailor's shirt with a boat neck that I bought on Nantucket. I don't see them any more; back in the day you could get them at L.L. Bean and Army/Navy stores.
The Chanel collection started with a group portraying the mother and children in Death in Venice by novelist Thomas Mann, and then went on to a procession of timeless outfits creating a romantic Venetian dream that evokes Henry James and John Singer Sargent.