On the Runway is NY Times's new blog on fashion,and i found this entry really interesting. It's by Cathy Horyn, my favorite fashion critic. (sorry if this is a repost)
I leave the Valentino show (dreamy white dresses in Robert Ryman textures) and go with my driver, Bernard Alloux, to Chanel. It is cold, nearly 10 p.m., and the lights in the house are ablaze. Two models are ahead of me at the door. Karl Lagerfeld is still doing fittings, and the show is in 24 hours. For once I am glad Lagerfeld is running late. The studio won’t be as crowded with editors. Andre Leon Talley and Michael Roberts, of Vanity Fair, will be there. But everyone else will be at Giancarlo Giammetti’s buffet dinner for Valentino, or tucked into their beds at the Ritz.
Not many designers have a green light above their door. The corporate structure of most of the Paris houses makes that impossible. You can’t just drop in on Galliano at Dior; and even if you could, by the time you got your security pass, waited for the p.r. escort, waited some more to go into the studio, you’d feel like a collapsed dinghy before the shore. But, with Chanel and Lagerfeld, you truly feel you are entering a house, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. In fact, in my experience, the only two designers who encourage this sort of atmosphere are Lagerfeld and Azzedine Alaia—which is funny, because Lagerfeld and Alaia can’t stand each other.
Lagerfeld has not yet arrived, so I go into the kitchen and fix myself a sandwich from a small buffet put out for workers and guests. I am half way through my ham sandwich, hunched over the little kitchen table, crumbs everywhere, when Lagerfeld puts his head in the door and says hello. If you think this qualifies as an unglamorous moment, let me just say that Lagerfeld is about as down to earth as a Rilke-loving, multilingual European can be. He tells the best dirty jokes. He also keeps with him a small leather-bound book that contains phone numbers, sketches, and photographs of his parents in their German salad days.
Talley and Roberts are in the studio, talking to Lagerfeld and Amanda Harlech, the former English fashion editor, who has worked with him for nearly 10 years. They are at Lagerfeld’s long desk, which occupies one end of the room. Music is playing. Along one side of the studio and at the opposite end are perhaps 10 assistants, as well as the heads, or premieres, of the ateliers: Madame Jacqueline, in charge of tailoring, and Madame Cecile and Madame Martine, who oversee draping.
In spite of the appearance of confusion, there is an order to the studio, with Lagerfeld seeing everything about him through his dark glasses. A model, her hair arranged as it will be in the show, with dredlocks of piped organdy, walks to the center of the room and stops. She has on a pale, shimmering green dress. There has been a problem with the dress, Lagerfeld explains; and now he goes over to see how the seamstresses have solved it. He looks at the bodice and then, over the model’s shoulder, calls out, “Bravo, Cecile. Bravo, Martine.”
The fittings go on like this, with Lagerfeld simultaneously holding conversations at the desk. At 11 p.m., a model walks to the center of the room in a long gray organdy dress with gray and white feathers splashing around the shoulders and the waist.
“It’s fantastic, so refined!” Talley exclaims, lounging deeper into his chair. “I want a sketch. Tomorrow! In my room. At the Ritz.”
Lagerfeld, standing next to Talley, says, “It could be a millimeter shorter.”
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