When Karl Lagerfeld became creative director of Chanel in 1983, the era of great French fashion was over. To defend this empire, Emperor Karl went to battle - against those who fashion-coded, hugged and ironized it in fashion. This was sung to him at the cradle, since he bore the name of Charlemagne and the imperial imperial house of the Ottonians. But Karl Lagerfeld conquered under a strange name, under the name of a stout woman who had not married her name but had made it herself: Coco Chanel.
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Coco Chanel, 1935
Coco is an abbreviation of cocotte. Not as a lady of the world, but as a child of the poorest conditions, who was educated in the orphanage after the death of her mother, Coco Chanel has risen into the fashion heaven. She rejected the marriage proposal of the Duke of Winchester, with whom she had a long affair: Duchesses of Winchester there were several, but only one Chanel. Lagerfeld finally made this foreign name of the great Mademoiselle immortal.
Men's fashion for women
The defining leitmotivs of Western fashion were those of class and gender. Women dressed as men, the big bourgeoisie dressed in the clothes of the sailors and fishermen, the gold digger and, in general, the working people. Chanel wanted to dress the natural woman, free her from the finery of femininity, the corset strings, lace, flounces, and giant hats that sweat and did not progress.
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Coco Chanel, 1965
From these three-dimensional fabric packages emerged like the Venus from the sea Chanel's new wife, who was a boy and could move freely. In the wide pants of the sailors, in the marinière, in the chanel costume, intended as a counterpart of the male suit, and the "little black man". Her whole life - Chanel is said to have said - was that she did nothing but translate the masculine into the feminine.
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Coco Chanel, around 1930
The French philosopher Roland Barthes found in 1967 that Chanel had become a classic of the classics, which attracts successful women with a past and a lot of money. The momentum that drove Chanel's fashion forward was exhausted when Lagerfeld took over Chanel in 1983. With the tuxedo by Yves Saint Laurent, the transfer of men's fashion into women's fashion was completed. Parisian fashion had moved from the conservative, bourgeois rive droite to the rive gauche, to the student quarters. She got her inspiration from the street, bubble up instead of trickle down.
So in 1981 the fashion world was shaken by an earthquake. The label Comme des Garçons had its first Parisian fashion show, which hit like a bomb: "The Empire wrote back", the postcolonial era had begun in fashion. All the parameters of the big fashion, which had remained essentially Parisian fashion, collapsed. A revolution of formal language had begun that was no longer based on beauty, perfection, accuracy of fit and elegance, but on an aesthetics of poverty, defectiveness and even ugliness. Not the relationship of classes and genders, but the relationship between body and matter was rethought.
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Comme des Garçons Ready to wear Spring Collection 1992
All this was also a homage to Chanel, because finally Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons set a secret monument to the great Mademoiselle who had invented the Garconne. Kawakubo, who claimed to understand neither English nor French, did so with a quote from the hit song by Françoise Hardy, "Comme des Garçons". From the earthquake of the Japanese "Big Three" Yamamoto, Myake, Kawakubo the "Belgian Five" to Martin Margiela, Dries van Noten, Anne Demeulemeester emerged. A little later, Antwerp - Belgium, a disaster in French ears - would train the designers who took over the Parisian houses with the big names.
Even the dirndl became Chanel
And Lagerfeld? Karl Lagerfeld did not focus on the deconstruction of fashion, but on its excessive mythical exaggeration. Karl Lagerfeld was first and foremost a mythographer and, like all mythographers, he became super-popular. He created the Chanel look, making it recognizable and imitable. He put Chanel on a formula. The jersey and bouclé wool, the patch pockets and the golden strands and buttons of the costume, the "little black dress" now also available as a costume jacket, beige shoes with a black cap that extend the legs, the quilted handbags with the intertwined CC , Even the dirndl became Chanel dirndl.
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Chanel Metiers d'Art Collection 2014/15
All dresses were adapted to the formula Chanel, Chanel was incorporated into all clothes as the DNA of fashion at all. In short, under Lagerfeld Chanel put off all classically elegant and became pop, superpop. Never before have so many people around the world wanted Chanel so unanimously. Karl Lagerfeld made Mademoiselle the face of fashion, indeed the face of Paris, the myth that can be exported worldwide. Paris, that's the Eiffel Tower, but since Lagerfeld that's just Chanel.
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Chanel Ready to Wear Spring Collection 2016/17
Against elitist, formally thought-out, intellectual deconstruction of fashion, he put consumable pop, a myth that sold like hotcakes. Against the postcolonial empire, which wrote back, he relied on the old empire of Parisian fashion, which he globalized as it never was more global. This was truly the imperial task of an imaginary emperor that never existed before.