Chanel spring-summmer 2018

A WALK in the park isn’t normally how you’d describe an haute couture collection. At the Chanel ateliers, petites mains have been toiling away for weeks at the 68 handcrafted looks that made up Karl Lagerfeld’s spring/summer 2018 offering this morning in Paris. 69, if you count his adorable godson Hudson Kroenig’s princeling blouse and tiny white jeans. (He served as flower boy to the bride.)

Yet the newly-bearded designer had foregone nearly all the theatrics and elaborate stage constructions that normally fill the Grand Palais for his Chanel shows. Instead, he erected a simple palatial French garden setting where rose-studded pergolas circled an 18th century fountain. You could find that setting in any garden between Versailles and the Tuileries, so costly as the set may have been you could virtually consider it banal.

Lagerfeld, of course, does not deal in banalities. And while he refuses to analyse the intentions behind his collections, we must assume there’s always a reason for everything he’s trying to show us. France - and more specifically Paris - was the subject of last season’s Chanel haute couture collection, an ode to the City of Lights. In December, Lagerfeld took his Metiers d’Art collection to his native Hamburg in a show that had nostalgia bells ringing.

So it was hard not to see this morning’s proposal as another step on the road to mapping out the places, cultures and mentalities that have shaped Lagerfeld through his 84 years of life. This was a jaunty collection rooted in the chicly frivolous spirit of la vie Parisienne, a state of mind that ranges from socialism to the deeply bourgeois but always remains civilised, with a sense of etiquette, the way Lagerfeld has always liked it.

The very idea of haute couture daywear epitomised in the first half of the collection’s distinctly Chanel-centric sculpted little skirt suits was exactly that: sophisticated, old-world, downplayed glamour. Breakfast in bed. 12 o’clock pick-me-ups. Chanel for lunch. Through the filter of Parisian society Karl Lagerfeld presented his ideal world; his hopes for the future, a theme reflected in his spring/summer 2018 ready-to-wear collection for Chanel.

Back then, he riffed on the restorative calm of nature in a huge waterfall set, an elegant comment on a currently mad world that must look even crazier through the eyes of a man with the life experience of Lagerfeld. If he approached his haute couture collection with those things in mind, it seemed he ended up turning to an escapism of sorts. The last series of ornately embellished evening dresses had a sweet and airy lightness about them to the point of saccharine.

Runway-side Chanel’s elusive haute couture clients smiled contently. They knew these kinds of clothes, they knew what this was about. And so, the total sum of Lagerfeld’s collection came to old world values: comfort in the familiar, and the sentiment he’s always promoted: learn from the past and look to the future. And try to behave, even if it’s not always easy.