Paris Fashion Week: Chanel wows and Zoolander shocks

"Bellissima" breathed the Italian woman to her friend at the finale of the Chanel show yesterday morning, her phone at the ready like every second person inside and outside the Grand Palais.

On a set made up to look like a traditional French brasserie, complete with tables, tray carrying waiters and croissants on the counters, the show was a spectacular mis en scene [perhaps a mis en Seine?]

The Chanel show’s set, like others from previous seasons featuring wind turbines, carousels or Parisian boulevards, was designed to entertain a well-heeled international audience of more than two thousand people, including photographers and press.

ExpandAutoplay

Image 1 of 3

Model Lily Donaldson walks during Chanel’s Paris Fashion Week show. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

The company, worth an estimated €6.5 billion, can afford such extravaganzas, reckoned to cost more than €3 million to stage.

Karl Lagerfeld

Refreshing the codes of Chanel is what Karl Lagerfeld does season after season. After more than 30 years at the helm, his vigour is unstoppable, his collections offering endless new takes on the familiar emblems associated with its founder - the quilting, the tweed, the jewellery, the tailored and the flou.

Tweed majored in this winter show, as everyday street items like parkas and hoodies were swept into luxury categories through jewelled and sparkling tweeds. Skirts were thickly encrusted and layered with silver and feathers and coats were oversize and cropped.

Lagerfeld took quilting to the point of exaggeration for a dubious monochrome, bubble wrapped from top to toe look, complete with shoulder bag. But elsewhere he made do with a little offhand tweed skirt with a knit.

As always, there were many very beautiful items; strictly tailored tweed coats, playful black and red plaid ensembles and, for evening, trapeze-shaped black dresses in layered chiffon and georgette.

Lagerfeld’s usual cheeky touches included a sweater with a rear pocket for a newspaper, a bag in the shape of a café plate and brilliantined male models in long tweed coats and ropes of pearls. Two tone pumps were standard throughout the show.

The show closed with an amusing moment, as model Cara Delevingne, in a flirty black dress and with slicked-backed hair, slapped a waiter on his backside as she passed him by.

Zoolander cameo

Valentino’s show also included star appeal, as the show, at the Espace Ephémere Tuileries, ended with real-life catwalk appearances from Derek Zoolander and Hansel. Both Derek (Ben Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson) shot to fame as characters in the 2001 fashion satire Zoolander. The pair walked the runway in advance of Zoolander 2, which opens February 2016.

Additional reporting: Agencies