CHANEL art ...

For the set of CHANEL’s Spring-Summer 2014 Prêt-à-Porter fashion show on 1 October 2013, Karl Lagerfeld transformed Paris’s Grand Palais into a vast art gallery filled with specially created CHANEL artworks. The CHANEL Art Book is a record of this gallery and unique moment in fashion history. Lagerfeld personally conceived each of the diverse paintings, sculptures and installations, many of which are ironic interpretations of CHANEL’s famous icons informed by a pop sensibility. Here we see expressive paintings of camellias, ladders with gold chains as rungs, and a cubist take on the two-tone shoe jostling for space alongside a robot in the shape of a No 5 perfume bottle and a giant sculpture of the double C logo. The myriad themes of art similarly shaped Lagerfeld’s collection – from dresses printed with colour charts, fabrics like canvases spattered with paint, to graffitied art students’ backpacks – all proof that the designer’s fashion creations and the sets in which they are shown are themselves like single consolidated ‘artworks’.