The Bite Magazine - issue 16

W hen the iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel passed away in 1971 at the age of 87, the future of her brand hung in the balance. A few of her assistants designed the couture and ready-to-wear until Karl Lagerfeld became crea- tive director in 1983. In the introduction of Chanel Catwalk – The Complete Karl Lagerfeld Collections , co-author Patrick Mauriès describes the moment when on 25 th January 1983 “a handful of specially invited guests gathered in the elegant and vener- able rooms of 31 rue Cambon, the same place where Mademoiselle Chanel, famously hidden on the staircase, presented her collections.” The guests were eager to find out how Lager- feld could “ever find his way out of the trap he’d got himself into: taking on the fading legacy of the fashion legend and bringing it up to date.” Coco Chanel had tried to make a comeback in 1954 and although she had succeeded in reviving the business over the years that followed, various attempts to continue her legacy had come to nothing, and the situation did not seem promising. “People tend to forget,” Lagerfeld remarked with a touch of his famous wit,“that once upon a time, Chanel was old hat. It was only Parisian doctors’ wives who still wore it. Nobody wanted it, it was hopeless.” The 1983 show choreographed by Lagerfeld was the first of many to come. The creative director looked back to the history of Chanel in order to bring the brand forward into the present with elements of its lexicons – camellias, the double-C motif, chains and costume jewellery. “If you look at the 1950s collections, the end of the 1950s,” Lagerfeld explained, “there are very few chains, there is no ‘CC’, and there are no camellias, but in the 1980s, we had to pull out all the stops because otherwise it would just have been a posh, unas- suming tweed suit with a little bow.These are the things that I drew out, exaggerated, and which I made people believe had always existed.” bite book review catwalk Jada Brookes discovers how Karl Lagerfeld completely turned the dormant Chanel fashion house around when some thought it was doomed for forever. Autumn/Winter 1992–1993 Haute Couture © firstVIEW