![]() ![]() When Lagerfeld took on the artistic directorship of Chanel in 1983, leaving his post at Chloé but keeping the job at Fendi, his challenge was to modernize the brand without alienating longtime fans. The iconic Chanel suit - a tight-shouldered, boxy tweed jacket and matching knee-length skirt - was seen as a dowdy throwback for, as Buck put it, ‘middle-aged lady politicians in the provinces.’” ![]() According to the New Yorker, Chanel sales plummeted in the ensuing years: “By 1982, the label was little more than a perfume company with some clothing boutiques. The following year, he took on the same role at Fendi, the Italian fur brand, working both jobs at once.Ĭhanel died in 1971, having shuttered her business during World War II and revived it to hard-won acclaim. (That same year, an 18-year-old Yves Saint Laurent won in the dress category the two influential designers would later become rivals.) Lagerfeld worked at Balmain and Jean Patou before becoming head designer of the French fashion house Chloé in 1964. At 21, he won a fashion competition with a design for a women’s coat, kicking off his career in the business. Gamma-Keystone/Getty Imagesīorn in Hamburg, Germany, in 1935 - a biographical detail that has been the subject of some debate - Lagerfeld moved to Paris as a teenager. Lagerfeld’s career was kick-started when he was 21, after he won a prestigious fashion award for this coat design. The same can be said of Chanel herself, whose enduring status as the matriarch of French fashion can obscure less savory aspects of her life, like her ties to the Nazi Party. 5, a perfume with a history veiled in layers of marketing and mythology. Certain Chanel pieces have reached icon status: the little black dress, the quilted handbag, and Chanel No. ![]() Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel founded her namesake fashion house in 1913, and today she’s widely credited with liberating women from their corsets by introducing jersey fabrics into her dresses, giving them an easier, more comfortable way of moving through the world. Lagerfeld and ChanelĬhanel was legendary long before Lagerfeld came along. He shaped what we think wealth looks like, and it looks like Chanel. Instead of setting the fashion agenda by starting specific trends that trickled down widely into the fashion ecosystem, Lagerfeld established items like Chanel’s quilted bags and two-tone shoes - indeed, anything bearing Chanel’s interlocking C logo, which he used liberally - as the ultimate markers of luxury and status. ![]() He took Chanel’s classic designs and reworked them over and over, turning them into enduring products for the modern era. It can feel like an understatement to say that Lagerfeld was a titan in the industry. Chanel’s most intricate, handmade couture dresses invariably wound up on the red carpets of the Oscars and Golden Globes, worn by A-listers like Nicole Kidman and Emma Stone.Įvery collection Lagerfeld designed was sure to involve tweed, a Chanel staple since the brand’s beginnings. Celebrities like Rihanna, Marion Cotillard, and Keira Knightley packed the front row. Lagerfeld had a keen sense for the spectacle of fashion: His Paris Fashion Week shows for Chanel involved set pieces like icebergs and towering cruise ships, which were just as much a testament to the brand’s financial muscle as they were to its designer’s inventiveness. In addition to producing multiple collections per year for each label, Lagerfeld was a photographer, shooting many of Chanel’s advertising campaigns himself, and a book publisher. At the end of his career, he was simultaneously the creative head of Chanel, the Italian fashion house Fendi, and his own eponymous brand. The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who brought a flagging brand called Chanel back to life in the early 1980s and turned it into one of the most powerful luxury brands in the world, has died at age 85.įamous for his dark sunglasses, snowy ponytail, and black suits, Lagerfeld was prolific, seemingly indefatigable. ![]()
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