For the first time, Karl Lagerfeld has staged a show in his birthplace, Hamburg, Germany.
For its Chanel Mertiers d'Art Collection, Karl looked to the culture of Hamburg in the ’60s as a jumping-off point for a mod, lively collection.
Lagerfeld has a love affair with architecture. This season’s show took place in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, it’s one of the city’s newest and most daring buildings. The setting was a modern—and star-studded—masterpiece.
Inside, guests like Lily-Rose Depp, Tilda Swinton, and Kristen Stewart were seated in the theater around an orchestra that played while models traversed the many tiers of the space.
Karl Lagerfeld was born in the northern German city of Hamburg, a major European shipping port. Tonight its most lauded, world-famous son returned with a slam-dunk of a Chanel Métiers d’Art show.
“I’ve never left; this is part of me,” he reflected after the show. “I like Hamburg as an idea; something in the back of my mind.”
German audiences love classical music. So it was that the Chanel Métiers d’Art show for 2018 was shown in the sweepingly modern auditorium, to live orchestral music. It was a non-nostalgic venue, untethered to any Hamburg he used to know and very much to his forward-looking taste. But even with all the stupendous architecture and the music going on, there was no distracting from the plain fact: Fashionwise, this homecoming collection ranks as one of Karl Lagerfeld’s very best.
