The Chanel Spring/Summer 2013 women's ready to wear runway show at the Grand Palais in Paris on Tuesday raised a few eyebrows, and not just for the new outfits from designer Karl Lagerfeld but for the design of the sets the 68 models strutted on, or the celeb wattage of Kanye West, Jennifer Lopez and her bedazzled four-year-old daughter in the front row.
It was hard to miss the 13 towering wind turbines that dominated the stage, and the solar panels that graced the stage and inspired the tiles on the catwalk. Green, it seems, must be the new black. What’s sexier than a few turbines? "Energy is the most important thing in life," Lagerfeld, who's known for his grand pronouncements, stated. "If I had to build a house, I would put (wind turbines) in the garden.”
Lagerfeld's home decorating desires aside, he is building a brand (Chanel's, and his own) and green is what he thinks will help him sell it. Don’t be misled, however. As the Atlantic points out, the wind turbines were, by necessity, powered by electricity. And the show didn’t accompany any kind of announcement that Chanel would start embracing sustainability in its choice of fabrics or manufacturing processes or packaging or, well, anything else.
“It's more about the mood of the times, not something you have to translate,” Lagerfeld said about making an eco-chic statement about renewable energy, according to DesignBoom.“It's all about the wind, it's in the air.” OK, Karl, is sustainability just a minimalist design element and not core to your brand? Nope. Lagerfeld explained his inspiration thusly, "I started to sketch in St. Tropez over the summer and it was so hot I wanted some fresh air." It would be more of a breath of fresh air if Chanel catwalked its talk.
So this was literally all for show, and more about being dramatcially chic than eco-chic. The collection, by the way, was in step with the logo-less, low-key conspicuous consumpution theme seen at Louis Vuitton's Paris Fashion Week show, being relatively logo-free — if you don't view themassive round handbag handles as riffs on the brand's iconic interlocking C's.
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