The New York Times-20080124-A Chanel As Big As the Ritz

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A Chanel As Big As the Ritz

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FASHION designers excel at monument-building: witness the rise of towers in cities like Tokyo and Shanghai. These multistory shops sell clothes and sunglasses, but they also serve to remind people of the power of a brand in a noisy consumerist world.

Coco Chanel died before she had to worry about that. Besides, she left a real monument to modern dressing: the cardigan jacket. How many other designers have created a style that is a uniform as much as a symbol, its iconic value on par with the Coca-Cola bottle? It's relatively easy to build a tower of glass.

Undeniably, the 75-foot model of the Chanel jacket that Karl Lagerfeld erected in the Grand Palais for the spring haute couture show on Tuesday smacks of kitsch. It would be a huckster's dream dome. There are days when you think the world is almost at that point where you could picture such a monstrosity in place of the Arc de Triomphe or the pyramids in Egypt -- and nobody would mind. Great! SHOP!

Mr. Lagerfeld's motives, if not entirely innocent, were simple. Although the jacket is probably the best-known object that Chanel created, after Chanel No. 5, she made many other styles and often dominated a decade with her influence.

So the idea was to use the jacket as the symbolic hub from which other styles emerged and inevitably returned to. The model, made of wood and painted to resemble concrete, sat on an revolving platform, and the models entered the runway through a flap in the jacket.

The clothes had wit, too. Seashells were the inspiration, Mr. Lagerfeld said the night before, in the Chanel studio. In the hands of another designer, this might sound banal, but as Mr. Lagerfeld opened a book on his desk called Coquillages, featuring shells from the collection of Jacques and Rita Senders, it was amazing to see the variety of hues and textures: the spirals, ridges, folds, spurs and feathery edges.

All those natural shapes Mr. Lagerfeld represented in couture silks. There were black wool day jackets with a curving line shown with draped miniskirts, one shaped in spiraling circles. Some of the suits had blouses with Elizabethan collars, a style that Chanel liked in the 1930s. Among the prettiest evening looks was a strapless beige tunic with ridges of pleated tulle and chiffon that ended in a rounded hem. It was shown with sheer, embroidered French culottes.

The pinks were the pinks of shells. The tiny marabou feathers and silver beads embedded in a pleated chiffon and tulle dress with a crisscross back and flaring skirt were pure Paris.

High fashion at this level is largely impervious to economic recessions. That's because the demand for $100,000 beaded dresses equals the supply. Last year, Dior had its largest annual sales gain in couture in its 60-year history, said Catherine Riviere, the couture director, adding that the biggest spenders come from Russia and the Persian Gulf states. One client, she said, spent about $500,000 for several garments.

So far as couture educates people about beauty and specialized hand crafts, a greater threat to its existence is the loss of know-how. Tonight, Valentino retires.

That John Galliano creates his Dior collections from historical references like the scandal-making Sargent portrait of Madame X or the story of Salome tends to confound the literal-minded. They expect to see these references, and when they get instead a ballooning sack dress in livid fuchsia silk mobbed with sequins, a pair of peacock-blue feather eyelashes and a gold lampshade hat, they complain that it's visually confusing.

Much that is modern does precisely that, and some other sensory power is needed to understand it. The only thing that really impaired this subtle and dazzling show on Monday was the clunky footwear, which defied the inexperienced models to walk and throw a pose at the same time. None of the balance created by the volumes and rather strict lines would have been lost if he had ditched the platforms.

Two thoughts came to mind with these clothes. One was the new composition of the colors (often hand-painted on silk) and the embroideries, which were at once intense and abstract. The other thought was the relative simplicity of the shapes. As far as the body goes, they suggested control -- and not. Pursuing that thought, it's not unimaginable that Mr. Galliano was in the middle of a conversation between Balenciaga and Dior.

At 7:30 p.m., on Monday, Giorgio Armani had his couture show -- a Prive sign put on the steps of the Palais de Chaillot to notify onlookers, the velvet ropes set out for celebrity and paparazzi alike.

Mr. Armani is a master at creating a scene. Inside, 10 men in crow's-nests trained stage lights on the runway. Sophia Loren, dressed in a dark coat and trousers, sat in the front row. There was no need to smile because Sophia Loren had smiled so many times before. Mr. Armani's niece, Roberta, sat next to Hilary Swank, who had on a black beaded cocktail dress. Ms. Armani never seemed to stop smiling.

The burlesque star Dita Von Teese, who had changed from a Dior in the afternoon to an Armani, its portrait neckline now framing her bosom, sat very still, her hands folded on her lap, the picture of a lady in drag.

The models performed their roles, too. Not the top girls, they struck poses and occasionally found a spot in the middle distance to fix a hard, blank gaze. The first outfits were in a fine gray bias-cut pinstripe, the jackets or bodices cut close to the body and the full skirts turned in sharply at the hem, like the edge of a paper lantern. Another motif of the collection was horizontal pleating, sometimes with a ladder of black plastic pieces inset into a tight bodice.

There was nothing lurid or in bad taste about Mr. Armani's clothes, but neither was there anything subtle or particularly surprising about them. Ruffled organdy dresses in citrus and gray tones looked light and feminine, and some tops and dresses were scattered with overlapping disks.

Everything looked impeccable. But despite his incredible design range over the years, irony and self-reference are not within his imagination, so there will never be a jewel of a dress coming out from a huge beige hub of an Armani jacket. The great thing about watching a Lagerfeld couture show, and to an extent a Galliano, is that each dress and jacket is not only unique but also conveys with wit the history of the house. You get that much less with Mr. Armani.

By contrast, Christian Lacroix made every choice count. His show on Tuesday was sensational. From the first outfits, like a deep blue coat dress with whirls of black embroidery, he commanded your attention. This was a rare Lacroix show. For one thing, the shapes were light and contemporary. For another, the collage effects made sense.

Among the prettiest looks was a quartet of draped chiffon dresses in colors like ruby and emerald. A black embroidered jacket appeared over a white lace T-shirt and wide creamy trousers. And there were surprises everywhere, like an embroidered sheer-white apron tied to the front of a silk-print dress, and a short-sleeve jacket with hand-knitted gold and burnt-red arm warmers. The collection seemed to exalt the eccentric modern dresser.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: CHANEL REDUX: Karl Lagerfeld leads models back into the Chanel jacket, left. Above, pale dresses of tulle, pleated chiffon and tiny marabou feathers, inspired by seashells. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEAN-LUCE HURE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.G1); MAKING A SCENE: Armani Prive fitted jacket and slim pleated shirt, far left. Above, Dior dress of silk organza. Right, Dior satin strapless with ballooning hemline. Left, Lacroix embroidered coatdress. Below, lace and flowers in braided hair, at Lacroix. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEAN-LUCE HURE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.G5)