Hemlines go up and down, colours come and go, supermodels rise and fall, but in one crucial respect catwalk fashion looks the same from season to season – the silhouette is always tall, and always thin.
So Karl Lagerfeld’s latest haute couture collection, shown in the Grand Palais in Paris on Tuesday, was as iconoclastic as fashion gets. By sculpting skirts into ovoid shapes and padding out slender hips, Lagerfeld proposed a new catwalk silhouette. The designer who once criticised the singer Adele for being “a little too fat” seemed finally ready to see beauty beyond a reed-thin outline.
A model presents a creation the Chanel collection.
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A model presents a creation from the Chanel collection. Photograph: Etienne Laurent/EPA
The inspiration for the silhouette was not Kim Kardashian, but Alberto Giacometti’s 1920s sculpture Spoon Woman. The colour scheme of the collection and setting paid homage to a British interior designer of the same era, Syrie Maugham. The white catwalk and seating alluded to the all-white interiors Maugham popularised.
The centrepiece of mirrored screens was another Maugham-inspired touch.
The pencil skirt of a tweed suit was blown out into an airy curve to give the illusion of a bigger bottom. A shift dress was fluted in an A-line from below an empire-line belt, as if gliding over a comfortably full tummy. There was nothing cartoonish or comic here. The effect was subtle, but unmistakably a departure from the conventional silhouette of a haute couture model, who in profile typically resembles Flat Stanley, the children’s book character.
