CHANEL The Métiers d’art Paris-Hamburg

Karl Lagerfeld has chosen Hamburg and the Elbphilharmonie to present the new CHANEL Métiers d’art collection. An extraordinary building conceived by the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, this concert hall sits majestically by the river like a futuristic liaison with the city’s industrial port. 

Past, present and future. The three units of time that have inspired Karl Lagerfeld for this Paris- Hamburg collection. Around these three axes, the designer infuses images of the Hamburg port, with gliding silhouettes of the merchant navy crew that he disrupts with the modernism of CHANEL. He revisits their wardrobe, re-appropriating their pea coats, their drop-front trousers, striped tops and immutable caps. While the spirit of Gabrielle Chanel – she who stole the striped sailor top and pea coat from men – is never far away, Karl Lagerfeld has enlarged this vocabulary of masculine/feminine by multiplying the details and reinventing the codes of the House to create a unique, daring, confident and ultra-feminine attitude. It is a pure and graceful line, a look punctuated with sailor collars, jackets that are more or less fitted, long redingotes, mini-skirts and extra-wide trousers designed to feminise this 76-strong crew of “sailors who haven’t taken to the water”, tells Karl Lagerfeld. In a cap pulled firmly down or occasionally veiled with a tulle scarf, their hands swathed in fingerless gloves, they pass with legs wrapped up in long knitted socks wearing bobbin heeled brogues with beaded bows.

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