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. CHANEL Art 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 color 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.”
Biography
Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer, publisher and book dealer, began working as a photographer in 1987. Lagerfeld has since received the Lucky Strike Design Award from the Raymond Lewy Foundation, the cultural prize from the German Photographic Society, and the ICP Trustees Award from the International Center of Photography. Steidl has published most of Lagerfeld’s books, including Casa Malaparte (1998), A Portrait of Dorian Gray (2004), Room Service (2006), The Beauty of Violence (2010) and the best-selling The Little Black Jacket (2012).
Book design by Karl Lagerfeld
and Gerhard Steidl
160 pages
8.1 × 8.9 in. / 20.5 × 22.5 cm
76 photographs
Clothbound hardcover with two-color
embossing and a tipped-in photo
ISBN 978-3-86930-766-4
€ 28.00