![]() One of the secrets of Chanel’s suits, highlighted in this show, is the gilt chain sewn into the hem of the jacket, which is there to add structure to the soft tweed silhouette by ensuring the fabric is evenly weighted around the body. As New Yorker writer Judith Thurman says of the success of the No 5 perfume – in Coco Chanel: Unbuttoned, a BBC film to be shown on Friday to coincide with the opening of this show – “to make a perfume that is identified for a century with allure says something about the person who invented it”. ![]() It cannot match the soaring emotion of Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty, nor the sugary fantasia of the Christian Dior retrospective, with its acres of cream cake-rich gowns on which to gorge.īut Gabrielle Chanel, born in 1883 and the originator of an aesthetic that looks modern 140 years later, has the main character energy to carry the story. But the challenge of this exhibition – which carries a designer price tag of £24 a ticket – is that Chanel’s understated elegance lacks fireworks. Low lighting catches the gleam on their clavicles, so that they look almost real. Elegant gunmetal grey mannequins pose like cocktail party guests. The subterranean Sainsbury Gallery is an appropriately sleek setting for a show that is a love letter to modernist chic. Photograph: Musée Carnavalet/Roger Viollet/Getty I spent some time trying without success to play favourites between a simple jet-black two-piece from the wardrobe of Marlene Dietrich, austere but for the braided double-C gold buttons, or a pert cream set with pockets trimmed in black, chic and charming as Chanel’s scent bottles.Īn advertisement for Chanel No 5 perfume, 1921. Any one of a splendid room of little black dresses – an invention that American Vogue in 1926 called “the frock that all the world will wear” – would look perfectly chic at any of this week’s London fashion week parties.Īnd reader, when I walked into the central atrium lined with 53 tweed suits – what Vogue called “the world’s prettiest uniform” – I’m fairly sure my pupils dilated. They tend to be solemnly reverential about embroidery, breathlessly in thrall to lace-work. Too many exhibitions of clothes can feel fussy and old-fashioned. There are straightforward pleasures in a show packed to the rafters with garments that modern visitors would be thrilled to wear now. Photograph: © CHANEL Photo Nicholas Alan Cope Perfectly chic: Chanel’s Marinière silk blouse, from her 1916 collection.
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