Chanel Exhibition at the MET

[helena]

thanks very much fashionyork. I enjoyed all that you posted. I love the editorial pieces. They look beautiful. The red flapper dress is amazing.

Love Karls gibberish.

 

[fashionyork]

Harper's Baazar... pic 2 & 3.

 

[fashionyork]

You're welcome Helena I loved that red number too. I really like CHanel early creations
Here from Vogue now

Info:
Model -Lily Donaldson
Editorial "The Chanel Century"
issue # may 2005
Photographed by Steven Meisel

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[fashionyork]

Just an update: Naomi Watts was wearing Calvin Klein Collection....not Chanel Couture as mentioned. I saw the dress in development and finishing stages. A step towards romanticism from Calvin....but love Chanel (and Karl), too!

Hummmmm....... Interesting.. I particulary didnt like much Naomi dress, although I know im in minority, seemed like a hit among most people. I like better the clean and minimalist feeling of CK.. Was Francisco Costa who made that dress too, should I assume?

 

[helena]

love all the dresses above with the exception of the 1987 and the 1996 ones (I remember Naomi C on a Vogue cover wearing the 1987 one). I didn't like it then either.

 

[Stilettophile]

Hummmmm....... Interesting.. I particulary didnt like much Naomi dress, although I know im in minority, seemed like a hit among most people. I like better the clean and minimalist feeling of CK.. Was Francisco Costa who made that dress too, should I assume?

Totally understand your opinion. Its tough to be make everyone happy. Theres still plenty of minimalism in the Collection.

 

[droogist]

Thank you so much for posting all that, fashionyork! I can't see the first batch of editorial pics from Harper's though...

 

[droogist]

and i seriously doubt if Chanel ever said that Vionnet & Sciap were 'ugly'

It wouldn't surprise me at all, that she would have said that...she had quite a sharp tongue. In terms of character, I actually find her and Karl quite similar: self-possessed, critical, prone to making sweeping pronouncements...

 

[liberty33r1b]

fashionyork, you are the best!!

 

[fashionyork]

liberty33r1b - thanks

Droogist, do you want me to email the pics to you? I can do that

 

[droogist]

Thanks, fashionyork (I sent you a pm)

 

[softgrey]

Karl Lagerfeld
1925 A little black chiffon dress, part of the Chanel exhibition that opens this week at the Met.


Karl Lagerfeld
Spring 1954 A straw hat with ribbon, inspired by sailors' uniforms.

A Peek Into Coco's Closet-from the nytimes...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/fashion/sundaystyles/01chanel.html?
By CATHY HORYN

Published: May 1, 2005

EVER since Gabrielle Chanel's death on Jan. 10, 1971, people have been asking the same question about her: "What would Coco think?" No designer has provoked more curiosity from the grave. If Chanel was one of the most opinionated women in Paris, capable of the mean remark as well as the sensible, she was not alone in creative power. Dior and Balenciaga also left large legacies. But nobody ever asks what they would think.

It may be that Chanel, the orphan girl whose life was an embroidery of lies, who kept (and was kept by) a string of wealthy lovers, who created her style after her own free-spirited image - it may be that she possessed something her rivals did not: a cult of personality. Dior died in the spa town of Montecatini after ingesting, it was said, a fatal helping of foie gras. Balenciaga simply closed the doors of his couture house one day and returned to his native Spain. In journalistic terms, they did not make good copy.

Chanel, on the other hand, has been the subject of numerous biographies, exhibitions and stage and film treatments, including the 1970 Broadway musical "Coco" that starred a knobby Katharine Hepburn in pearls and tweeds. Chanel No. 5, the perfume she created at the start of the Roaring Twenties, bottling it in a plain pharmaceutical flacon, is today the top-selling fragrance in the world. And of course in the 22 years since Karl Lagerfeld took over the designs for the house, amplifying and subverting her themes, to the point of putting her likeness on baubles, her cult has only grown. Everyone knows something about the woman even if they don't know everything about what made her a genius of modernism.

On Wednesday a new Chanel exhibition opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, five years after a previously planned show was canceled over objections about its focus, and Mr. Lagerfeld and the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, publicly spatted. (It continues through Aug. 7.) As Mr. Lagerfeld, who wanted an installation that would include works by contemporary artists, said at the time, "I'm not interested in an exhibit that's just old dresses."

Mr. Lagerfeld had no direct involvement in this exhibition, said its curators, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton of the Met's Costume Institute. He did, however, provide certain insights about Chanel's work, and he approved the choice of Olivier Saillard, a well-known curator in Paris, to design the white Corbusier-like grid of boxes in which 60 examples of both Chanel's original pieces and Mr. Lagerfeld's interpretations will be minimally displayed. These will be interspersed with cases of jewelry, both real and costume, and three separate cubes in which a video artist has created abstract montages of Chanel motifs, like sequins and the famous Coromandel screens from her Paris apartment.

Given the show's starkly conceptual design, which includes no biographical references - not even so much as a Beaton portrait - and the proprietary way that people feel about Chanel, it will not be surprising if many of the 400,000 expected visitors frown and say to themselves, "What would Coco think?"

Mr. Koda acknowledges that visitors expecting to see a soup-to-nuts retrospective will be disappointed, even outraged. "My fear is that all the people who are completely immersed in Chanel, and there a lot of women who wear only Chanel, are going to be mad," he said. "Because we don't have their Chanels in the exhibition. That's my nightmare."

the rest of the article is at the link above...

 

[softgrey]

A Peek Into Coco's Closet-from the nytimes...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/fashion/sundaystyles/01chanel.html?
By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 1, 2005

EVER since Gabrielle Chanel's death on Jan. 10, 1971, people have been asking the same question about her: "What would Coco think?" No designer has provoked more curiosity from the grave. If Chanel was one of the most opinionated women in Paris, capable of the mean remark as well as the sensible, she was not alone in creative power. Dior and Balenciaga also left large legacies. But nobody ever asks what they would think.

It may be that Chanel, the orphan girl whose life was an embroidery of lies, who kept (and was kept by) a string of wealthy lovers, who created her style after her own free-spirited image - it may be that she possessed something her rivals did not: a cult of personality. Dior died in the spa town of Montecatini after ingesting, it was said, a fatal helping of foie gras. Balenciaga simply closed the doors of his couture house one day and returned to his native Spain. In journalistic terms, they did not make good copy.

Chanel, on the other hand, has been the subject of numerous biographies, exhibitions and stage and film treatments, including the 1970 Broadway musical "Coco" that starred a knobby Katharine Hepburn in pearls and tweeds. Chanel No. 5, the perfume she created at the start of the Roaring Twenties, bottling it in a plain pharmaceutical flacon, is today the top-selling fragrance in the world. And of course in the 22 years since Karl Lagerfeld took over the designs for the house, amplifying and subverting her themes, to the point of putting her likeness on baubles, her cult has only grown. Everyone knows something about the woman even if they don't know everything about what made her a genius of modernism.

On Wednesday a new Chanel exhibition opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, five years after a previously planned show was canceled over objections about its focus, and Mr. Lagerfeld and the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, publicly spatted. (It continues through Aug. 7.) As Mr. Lagerfeld, who wanted an installation that would include works by contemporary artists, said at the time, "I'm not interested in an exhibit that's just old dresses."

Mr. Lagerfeld had no direct involvement in this exhibition, said its curators, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton of the Met's Costume Institute. He did, however, provide certain insights about Chanel's work, and he approved the choice of Olivier Saillard, a well-known curator in Paris, to design the white Corbusier-like grid of boxes in which 60 examples of both Chanel's original pieces and Mr. Lagerfeld's interpretations will be minimally displayed. These will be interspersed with cases of jewelry, both real and costume, and three separate cubes in which a video artist has created abstract montages of Chanel motifs, like sequins and the famous Coromandel screens from her Paris apartment.

Given the show's starkly conceptual design, which includes no biographical references - not even so much as a Beaton portrait - and the proprietary way that people feel about Chanel, it will not be surprising if many of the 400,000 expected visitors frown and say to themselves, "What would Coco think?"

Mr. Koda acknowledges that visitors expecting to see a soup-to-nuts retrospective will be disappointed, even outraged. "My fear is that all the people who are completely immersed in Chanel, and there a lot of women who wear only Chanel, are going to be mad," he said. "Because we don't have their Chanels in the exhibition. That's my nightmare."

the rest of the article is at the link above...

 

[softgrey]

1925 A little black chiffon dress, part of the Chanel exhibition that opens this week at the Met.



Spring 1954 A straw hat with ribbon, inspired by sailors' uniforms.

 

[softgrey]

more from the ny times article...

Mr. Koda said that while Mr. Lagerfeld was not involved, and made no attempt to interfere in the selections for the exhibition, it would have been unthinkable not to ask for his aesthetic opinions. "No one knows the iconography of Chanel better than Karl," Mr. Koda said. Still, the invisible hand of Mr. Lagerfeld may be felt in unexpected ways. He colored the black-and-white photographs for the exhibit's catalog, and he has lent the house's chief hairdresser, Odile Gilbert, to see that the mannequins' feathered caps look right.

thanks for the topic helena...and for all the great pics and article fashionyork...

 

[faust]

Oh, sure, Paris and Florence get Yamamoto, Holland gets Chalayan, and we get this?! BOOOOOOORIIIIIIIIIING.

 

[helena]

faust - I don't think it is boring. Chanel was as much a revolutionary as Yohji or Chalayan in her day. I guess it depends upon the 'story' that goes with the exhibition. How the clothes are explained by the narrative.....or what narrative the clothes actually take. I think that it would be hard to depict Chanel's radical spirit in the absence of anything (from the time) against which to compare it, or even simply an explanation of the sartorial & gender norms of the time.

 

[Lena]

here, Suzy Menkes of the IHT on the Chanel exhibit

Coco Chanel was mistress of the pithy phrase. Here is a sharp line: "I am neither in the past nor avant-garde. My style follows life." Her words are echoed by Karl Lagerfeld, the designer who has reincarnated Chanel for 22 years. "I like today; I am not interested in the past," he says. "My task is to anticipate for Chanel what will be in fashion tomorrow." Those phrases, running in digital letters on the white cubes that house the "Chanel" display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sum up the essence and the limitations of this exhibition, which is devoted to fashion's incorrigible 20th-century modernist - and the designer who has kept her flame alive since 1983.

With Nicole Kidman, the face and sinuous body of the Chanel No.5 perfume, as a co-chair with Anna Wintour of American Vogue, the opening gala on Monday was designed to be as glamorous and put-together as befits the famed Parisian couture house.


As Philippe de Montebello, the Metropolitan's director, says of Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who died in 1971: "She became one of the first couturiers to be celebrated as much for her glamorous persona as for her impeccable designs."


"Chanel," which runs from Thursday to Aug. 7, has twin missions: to show the timeless image of a fashion house that has survived for almost a century, and to open a dialogue between Coco and Karl. The exhibition starts with Lagerfeld's slender gilded dress, its lacy leaf pattern projected as video art, which then morphs into a famous, dreamy Cecil Beaton portrait of Chanel herself. It is the only brief appearance of a designer who had an innate understanding of what it meant to be a woman of the new 20th century. In the display, Marilyn Monroe gets a better visual billing, in a floating image of the star clutching a bottle of Chanel No.5. Lagerfeld appears only as a ghostly abstraction of his silhouette. So much the better, perhaps, that instead of dwelling on personalities, the show focuses on the clothes, for they are stunning both for themselves and for their anticipation of modernist canons of dress.


Harold Koda, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan, says, "Chanel invented a vocabulary that Karl then plays with."


He and the associate curator, Andrew Bolton, envisaged the display as a focus on codes: the invention of sportswear in the 1920s, dandyism in male-female crossover dressing, the romance of Bohemia and the allure of lace in the 1930s, and the "total look" of a tweed suit, two-tone shoes and a quilted handbag in the 1950s. Add early beauty products in graphic black-and-white packaging, jewelry like the Maltese cross and swags of fake pearls, and the camellia, which is projected in watery patterns as video "wallpaper" by the artist Marie Maillard.


Lagerfeld, who has always eschewed fashion retrospectives and who admits to problems in discussing the Chanel exhibition with the museum, had nothing to do with the scenario, which he saw only on the eve of the opening. He merely approved the choice of garments and worked on the striking and inventive catalogue. The story unfolds with a sporty beige knitted coat inspired by British aristocratic males on the polo field and a jersey dress taken from his lordship's underwear. But there is no biographical road map for those who don't know about Coco's dalliance with the Duke of Westminster nor her early days as a Deauville milliner. The display is purist to a fault, designed in four alleyways of white modules that represent "Pavillons d'Élégance" from the 1925 Exposition Universelle, according to Olivier Saillard, a consultant from the Musée de la Mode in Paris.


Porridge tweed suits that Saillard describes as "chic ennuyeux" or "boring chic" are punctuated with a Lagerfeld miniskirted version, just as the classic black-quilted handbags are displayed with moon boots and a biker jacket as Lagerfeld's take on leather.


More might have been made of this wavering waltz between Karl and Coco. Koda says that the Lagerfeld pieces are meant to "spice up" the exhibition, which might otherwise seem disconnected from a contemporary audience. Bolton's theory is that to Chanel's pure modernism, Lagerfeld plays postmodernist, which makes for eclectic mixes of elite and popular culture.


The surprises of the show are in the evening clothes: Chanel's use of lace, for which she was famous in the 1930s; her vivid red among the familiar beige, black and white neutrals; and her whimsical pieces like gypsy gowns or pajamas with lace jabot, worn by Diana Vreeland, the iconic Vogue editor.


But where are the images of Vreeland? Or of Chanel wearing a mud-brown suit, its tiny unlined jackets as light as knit?


The human body is the one strategic factor missing from this carefully thought-out exhibition. It may be, as Koda surmises, that Chanel's enthusiasm for slithering waterfalls of silk and for bared backs was to draw attention away from her flat bust. But the point is that Chanel had brought the body into focus, as she abandoned the carapaces that had previously altered and tortured the natural female body shape. Her great invention was fashions in which the body could move freely.


Given all the multimedia resources available to museums today, why do we never see the clothes as they appeared in photographs or moving on the runway? A flash of a dress appears in the camellia video. And those familiar with Chanel imagery will see in Lagerfeld's breezy pants worn with loops of pearls the photographs of Coco herself in Deauville. "Clothes for a museum can never be on a human body," says Lagerfeld, explaining the extraordinary technique he used to make the computer-enhanced photographs in the catalogue come to life. He reconfigured silhouettes, touched faces with vestiges of makeup and created period hairstyles. The complex, time-absorbing technique known as "algraphy" results in images as fluid as watercolors. "The spirit, the body, the attitude - that is what gives a dress magic," Lagerfeld says.

These vaporous, ghostly images might well have been projected, although the show's mannequins have their faces touched with color and their "hair" created from feathers.

In the evening wear, the lack of the human body seems less acute as the couture creations speak for themselves, from the soft satin dresses in face-powder colors from the 1930s, through Lagerfeld's embroidered dresses inspired by Coromandel screens. "Chanel" gives the public a chance to see some of the loveliest dresses ever created that have never exploited or ridiculed women. It also gets to the soul of what is modern in fashion and how early and timeless its invention was. But even if the Met has put this modernist beauty under the spotlight, it has not succeeded in capturing the freedom the clothes incarnated.

Droogist:
It wouldn't surprise me at all, that she would have said that...she had quite a sharp tongue. In terms of character, I actually find her and Karl quite similar: self-possessed, critical, prone to making sweeping pronouncements...

my dear droogist, its wellknown that Coco had a 'problem' with Vionnet and Sciap , so did those designers with her.. and yes, its true Coco wasnt Mother Teresa BUT, remember at her time people HAD to keep appearances and stay polite, so i'm positive that she never used the term 'ugly' that's too 2005, its too cheap a term for mlle Chanel to use in public.. she never thought herself as 'beautiful' either, so i'm positive it's Her Karla taking liberties on Coco's quotes and this makes me MAD

 

[Lena]

Chanel was as much a revolutionary as Yohji or Chalayan in her day.

not to say she was much more of a revolutionary -at her time- than Yohji or Chalayan will ever be.. dont judge Chanel by Lagerfeld, he's a clown really and so totally unispiring

 

[helena]

not to say she was much more of a revolutionary -at her time- than Yohji or Chalayan will ever be.. dont judge Chanel by Lagerfeld, he's a clown really and so totally unispiring

you are right Lena neither Yohji nor Chalayan has changed profoundly the way we dress today. I never really liked what Lagerfeld did with pret-a-porter although I think he does a much better job with couture. Do you remember the surfer themed collection - disgusting? and the chanel leathers that he did in the late 80's - I thought all that was just hideous.