~Chanel~
Take a look at this!! If you haven’t had your dose of the New York Times Thursday Styles Section…. Well take a look at this. Its a great story!!
FASHION designers excel at monument-building: witness the rise of towers in cities like Tokyo and Shanghai. These multistory shops sell clothes and sunglasses, but they also serve to remind people of the power of a brand in a noisy consumerist world.
Coco Chanel died before she had to worry about that. Besides, she left a real monument to modern dressing: the cardigan jacket. How many other designers have created a style that is a uniform as much as a symbol, its iconic value on par with the Coca-Cola bottle? It’s relatively easy to build a tower of glass.
Undeniably, the 75-foot model of the Chanel jacket that Karl Lagerfelderected in the Grand Palais for the spring haute couture show on Tuesday smacks of kitsch. It would be a huckster’s dream dome. There are days when you think the world is almost at that point where you could picture such a monstrosity in place of the Arc de Triomphe or the pyramids in Egypt — and nobody would mind. Great! SHOP!
Mr. Lagerfeld’s motives, if not entirely innocent, were simple. Although the jacket is probably the best-known object that Chanel created, after Chanel No. 5, she made many other styles and often dominated a decade with her influence.
For more on this story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/fashion/shows/24COUTURE.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=chanel&st=nyt&oref=slogin
