Chanel Spring-Summer 2018 via Paris Fashion Week

October 3, 2017

“I think I’m lazy, I could do better, I make an effort next time” Karl Lagerfeld said this morning, on the Spring-Summer 2018 Chanel show.

Via British Vogue

“Waterfalls are the healthiest thing in the world,” he said after his spring/summer 2018 Chanel show where luxuriant rocks evoking Gorges du Verdon – the canyon in the South-East of France – turned the Grand Palais into an imposing waterfall. “The breeze was pleasant,” Lagerfeld noted, pointing out the cool flurry exuding from the cascading water, cutting through the greenhouse-like heat building inside the giant glass-roofed building.

“It’s up to you what you see, whatever you see. I haven’t seen the show,” he said with typical no-nonsense delivery. “I don’t make philosophical notes on it.”

“In the Sixties I was bored. How horrible,” he shrugged. “I liked the Seventies. They were all glamour.” Be as it may, his collection had memories of the Space Age sentimentality we’ve come across more than once this season, no doubt thanks to Lagerfeld’s own Rocket Man show for Chanel last March.

It’s the Barbarella look we associate with Jane Fonda and Paco Rabanne in the late Sixties. Fonda, like her contemporaries Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, represented the fashionable activism of the time – an age of political youth revolt, which Lagerfeld lived through as a young man in his 30s.

Now 84, you can see how the current political waves would give him a deja-vu to those “horrible” but impactful years, and the “all-glamour” escapism that followed in the Seventies.

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“I have no archives, nothing,” he reminded his audience – but in this collection was a clear-as-plastic subliminal message to learn from the past in our approach to the future.

“He believes in beauty, he’s Venus as a boy,” Björk serenaded the designer on the soundtrack, and comparing Lagerfeld to the goddess of beauty and prosperity seemed like an appropriate sentiment at this point in his career.

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“I think I’m lazy, I could do better, I make an effort next time,” he said with self-effacing insight. It made you wonder if Lagerfeld’s objectives in life, as one of the world’s influential people, now go way beyond the improvement of just fashion.