The talk of the fashion town yesterday was Karl Lagerfeld’s showing of the Chanel Spring 2011 collection at Paris Fashion Week. It was apparently quite the show (as it always is). Karl sent 80 different models onto a circular runway in 85 different looks. They were accompanied by a symphony.

Karl’s collection was inspired by the 1961 french film Last Year at Marienbad (click here to see the trailer), an avant-garde film shot in black & white that has a surrealist dream-like feel. In the most pivotal scene in the movie, the 2 main characters (followed by the camera) rush out of a château and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden. The people standing around the garden cast long shadows, while the trees in the garden do not.  Not coincidentally, Coco Chanel herself designed the costumes for the  lead female character in the movie.

Karl’s stage set for his show was a modern interpretation of this garden scene, which also paid homage to the 17th-century garden designer André Le Nôtre, who created the formal, clipped gardens at Versailles and the Tuileries in Paris. 

He sent down the runway a look for every type of girl (or just me, in a typical week) – the prep, the rock star, the princess, the goth, the exotic. All classed up in a very Chanel way, of course. Karl tied all his looks together with a narrow mostly black and white color palette that was sprinkled with spring-appropriate yellow, blue and pink pastels. His focus for his pieces was play with texture: he mixed sheer fabrics, feathers, fur, tweed. and ruching. Gorgeous.

Take me to dream-land Karl…

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bravo, Karl (as always)

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“With the sheer exuberant abundance of this collection, Lagerfeld reminded us that no matter what her age, or whether her style is precise or a little more romantic, he knows just how to dress chic women everywhere.”- Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, Vogue.com