One of the great debates of the latest fashion week didn't focus on the clothes and accessories, but about Karl Lagerfeld staging a "feminist protest" inside the Grand Palais. For the occasion, the designer recreated a Parisian street, the fictitious "Boulevard Chanel", in which everything was simply perfect, from the surrounding buildings to the puddles on the pavement.
Models walked and strolled around this quiet street, chatting in their tweed suits (long jackets with flared trousers or mini skirts), in designs characterised by arty floral silk prints or with motifs that called to mind splashes of colourful paint. There were also functional suede sahariennes, embellished cocktail dresses covered in neat lines of concrete-like leather mosaic tiles (a connection with the Haute Couture A/W 2014-15 collection?) with flowers peeking through them (dubbed by Lagerfeld "pavement embroidery") and pin-striped suits that looked as if they had been plasticised, plus Chanel's signature striped cardigans, dresses with ample white collars that seemed borrowed from the portraits of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, and designs with black and white Optical Art-evoking motifs.
Jewellery included whistles hanging from necklaces, slogan bracelets, necklaces with mathematical equations (apparently, 5X5 equals the Chanel logo...); bags were covered with badges and pins, vandalised with slogans (so new...) and crocheted or thread flowers (you can easily make them by hand, by the way...), or were shaped like a Chanel jacket (the new "Girl" bag) worn across the body or like small amplifiers and made to look like those bulky '70s recorders carried around by journalists (think about Monica Vitti in The Pacifist and you get the idea).
For the finale Lagerfeld staged a demonstration (so the whistles weren't really made to go to a rave after all...) with banners in French and English reading (some of the following slogans were actually also printed on the bags) "Tweed is better than tweet", "Be your own stylist", "Make fashion not war", "Free freedom", "Boys Should Get Pregnant Too", "Ladies first", and "HeForShe", the latter on a banner carried by a male model, a nod to the new UN solidarity movement fronted by actor Emma Watson. To complete it all the ubiquitous Cara Delevingne screamed on quilted Chanel megaphones, "What do we want?" (by the way, no umbrellas in sight to call to mind the current protests in Hong Kong, so not even Lagerfeld could guess the power of the humble umbrella...and he won't be able to exploit it come next Spring).
According to fashion history Coco Chanel liberated women granting them a more comfortable silhouette, fake pearl necklaces and the functional practicality of a little black dress, so it seemed only natural to reinvent her for a feminist protest inspired by the streets. Yet this spectacle was pretty vapid, especially when you consider what goes on for real in the streets, with the recent pro-democracy demos in Hong Kong, or when you think about all the women who every day are victims of violent and sexual abuses.
Surely Lagerfeld didn't think he was tackling these issues through the (utterly dumb) slogans that culminated in "History is Her Story" - the bitterly funny thing being that "history" comes from the Latin "historia", a term that originates in Roman languages not a male but a female noun (so in my language, Italian, history is actually by default a female noun – la storia).
This wasn't in fact an appropriation of a feminist protest, but it was the interpretation Lagerfeld gave us of a street protest. Having lived for most of his life in a gilded ivory tower, Lagerfeld naturally thinks these are clothes for "every single woman-girl" – or we may point out, for every single woman-girl who never took part in a rally, never confronted the police and was never tear gassed by anti-riot forces.
The main problem with this pile of utter nonsense? If you criticise it for trivialising a protest, pro-Chanel fashion critics will say you're a bore, an embittered old school feminist, dressed in black and preaching against men; if you embrace the fun and start thinking you can support the feminist cause via bland slogans, you are greatly deluding yourself, because - sure - you can be a feminist and be dressed in glamorously expensive Chanel (supposed that's what they meant by "Feminism not masochism"?), but you can't expect to sort of out inequalities using a pile of stupid slogans and designer clothes.
Lagerfeld may be a genuine visionary, but he can't be "every woman", as Chaka Kahn sang at the end of the show, simply because most ordinary women will never be able to afford these clothes. The majority of ordinary women out there will indeed turn to high street copies, confirming that there is not even equality between women, so how can there be equality between the sexes?
Besides, the designer can't claim he wants to represent every woman when his catwalk is prevalently white and crowded with thin and tall young women. He insisted during the preview this was about "all different kinds of women...like walking in the streets", but it's clear that he doesn't walk the same ordinary streets we all walk, after all this is the same man who offended singer Adele for being a "little too fat" and stated roughly a year ago that "no one wants to see curvy women on the runway" blaming "fat people" for France's public health deficit (well, you're 80, you dress like a cretin and you wear gloves to hide your age, plus your cat is served by maids when people out there are starving, but nobody has the courage to tell you such things because they are too scared they will lose advertising money).
I totally agree, Lagerfeld is a visionary character, he is such a visionary character that he is completely detached from reality, like most fashion people. You saying that fashion is supposed to create a fantasy? You right, but it also supposed to generate jobs and provide us with the possibility of making a statement, so it is a fantasy that may have a real impact on society.
But the impact on society of these fashon houses seems to have reduced to selling fragrances and make up as - let's be frank about it - the clothes (though made with high quality fabrics) look at times rather frumpy and dated and not even that new. For quite a few years now, Lagerfeld has also focused on producing ridiculously expensive items ranging from vandalised rucksacks to the supermarket baskets from the A/W 2014-15 collection.
Prices for this item go from roughly £4,200 for the small version to over £7,100 for the larger one, like the basket version sported by Anna Dello Russo in the following image. Surely these things are aimed not at ordinary women but at the wealthy and vapid celebrities who need designer clothes and accessories to prove that they have status and therefore they exist ("I shop and wear Chanel, therefore I am," may be the perfect description for this image of Anna Dello Russo who looks completely ridiculous with a Chanel basket full of Chanel/Fendi bags and massive padlock and chain hanging from all that...).
I doubt the spirit of emancipation will pass through a handbag: equality is gained through key shifts in education, economy and politics, and not through street style turned into chic street or by using the catwalk-with-a-message format to prove us that an industry that mainly makes women feel constantly inadequate actually loves and respects women.
During the latest fashion weeks, between designers who want us dressed like a Barbie doll, or a statue of the Virgin Mary and Lagerfeld who thinks we will be going to a street rally clad in a tweed suit, they got it all terribly wrong. So, what do women genuinely want? A less contrived and more honest form of fashion, less prone to using women for its own dirty purposes (making money that usually ends up making richer the people at the top of the pyramid...and those ones are usually men), and maybe less enthusiastic fashion reviews calling a fashion designer a genius.
Yet this is not be all Lagerfeld's fault: artifice and appropriation have always been part of the fashion industry. One year fashion appropriates art, another religion and now it's the turn of fashionable feminism turned into a trend. But what will happen in six months' time when feminism won't be fashionable anymore?
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