Luxury and Discipline Reborn in Name of Legendary Chanel
“Mlle. Chanel is young ,” Kitty D’Alessio, president of Chanel, said.
“I thought she was dead ,” said a guest at last week’s opening-night party for the new Chanel boutique on Rodeo Drive.
The guest was only partly right. Although the legendary designer died in 1971 at age 88--leaving her suit, her shoe and her bag to the public domain--Chanel’s fashion spirit has been reborn in the past three years, after languishing for a few decades.
Women with social and economic clout are again buying real Chanels from the source--as opposed to buying imitations produced so prolifically by hordes of suit, shoe and handbag designers.
Chanel perfumes are still best sellers, and a new scent named Coco will have its U.S. debut at the Beverly Hills boutique in September.
Second in Major City
Free-standing U.S. Chanel boutiques (Hawaii was the first location, Beverly Hills the second) are planned for major cities.
But most important of all, the very name Chanel is becoming vital again, a symbol of contemporary elegance rather than of a designer whose heyday was the 1920s. (It was 60 years ago that Chanel introduced jersey fabric to the upper classes, pioneered man-tailoring for women and virtually “invented” the little black dress, the pleated skirt, the fur-lined coat and the cardigan suit.)
The woman most credited with the current U.S. rebirth of Chanel is D’Alessio--who sometimes speaks as if she is in direct contact with “Mademoiselle” from somewhere above.
Still Repeats Message
“Wake up, down there. Don’t make a shrine of me. Make me alive,” was Chanel’s message to D’Alessio when she became president of New York Chanel five years ago. D’Alessio repeats the words with religious fervor to this day, explaining that she “took them very much to heart.”
She had already spent a lifetime--23 years--working on Chanel advertising at Norman, Craig & Kummel, a New York ad agency. She was steeped in the lore, the looks, the scents.
“Mlle. Chanel invented the 20th-Century woman,” D’Alessio said. “She was a working woman in an era when it wasn’t socially acceptable for women to work, when designing wasn’t even a socially acceptable profession. Everything she did was bold, courageous, ahead of its time.”
But the name Chanel had become somewhat ossified during the past decade. It had to be modernized the way “Mademoiselle” would have wanted it had she started her business today, the new Chanel president believed.
D’Alessio said she wasn’t sure what to do when she started her new job, so she did nothing but study America. For at least a year, she said, she traveled through the United States. “I didn’t travel fancy. I went to cities and towns, took buses and taxis.” And she finally realized, she said, that Chanel’s legacy was brilliant and totally modern, but “it was in pieces.”
“We had the clothes, the perfume, the accessories, the jewelry--the whole body of Chanel work so appropriate for modern interpretation. We needed someone to take custody of it.”
Persuades Lagerfeld
In what became D’Alessio’s boldest (some say, most brilliant) stroke, she persuaded Paris designer Karl Lagerfeld to design Chanel couture and ready-to-wear.
The fashion world was astounded. Lagerfeld was a design loner, a ponytailed prodigy who carried a fan and lived in an antique-filled, 18th-Century Paris mansion and a high-tech Monaco apartment. His design fantasies were indubitably his own, so it was inconceivable to most experts that he could carry on this other, older tradition, or that he would even care to do so. Even more confounding, Lagerfeld’s perfumes, Chloe and KL, are manufactured by Elizabeth Arden--a firm competitive with Chanel in the fragrance and cosmetics fields.
What led D’Alessio to decide on Lagerfeld rather than others who had more obvious tendencies toward the Chanel mode?
Her answer illuminates her own creative process: “Lagerfeld respected Chanel. He never borrowed from her. He never, in any of his own collections, used a single Chanel touch,” she replied.
In addition, D’Alessio said, and equally important, “Lagerfeld understood luxury without vulgarity. At Chanel we have a particular criterion. It is the marriage of discipline and luxury with no vulgarity. He grew up in that world, was surrounded by it throughout his childhood.” (Lagerfeld was born rich in Germany and grew up in rarefied surroundings as the heir to one of the largest dairy fortunes in Europe.)
When Lagerfeld agreed to the assignment, D’Alessio said, he took a scholarly approach. “He did months of research on Chanel’s work, he made books about it, we talked about how it would be modernized.”
Huge Success
The result was a huge success, D’Alessio said. Lagerfeld’s couture collections have “picked up the whole couture. We can’t show in our salon any more because we are too crowded.” (Couture suits range from $5,000 to $15,000; dresses can cost up to $60,000 apiece.)
In ready-to-wear, the success seems equally phenomenal. Chanel suits (about $1,400), jackets (about $830) and skirts (about $540) are turning up on professional and social types who are important enough to make the news and/or the social pages.
Sweaters, belts, handbags, scarfs, jewelry are “edited” and/or designed by Frances Stein, a former New York fashion magazine editor whom D’Alessio “knew would be perfect for the job.”
Stein, Lagerfeld and D’Alessio work together constantly, she said, to achieve “one worldwide voice for Chanel, a voice of continuity. We will never do anything that taints the name of Chanel. We have made our choice in this world, and for us the choice is quality above all.”
The new Beverly Hills boutique is an example. Its beauty is irrelevant; its character is what counts. Its simple, clean-line structure is reminiscent of “a Chanel gift box,” architect Christian Gallion said. The “shop girls” wear uniforms quintessentially Chanel: crisp white Chanel blouses, simple black Chanel skirts.
Cashmere sweaters, scarfs and other accessories repose on crystal (rather than plain glass) shelves. The staircase wall is mirrored to mimic the one in Chanel’s original rue Cambon boutique. All the exquisite touches are there, but only the discerning eye will catch them.
The clothes on the racks have a similar appeal. They are what D’Alessio calls “demi-couture.” Not machine-cut, like packaged cookies, but in some areas such as buttonholes, seams and linings, constructed and finished by hand. The suits are “softly tailored and sexy,” she explained, and they are “essentially faithful to Chanel’s lines.” Though on hangers they may look like “business as usual,” D’Alessio said, “women who wear them get addicted to the sneaky, private luxuries of these clothes. The way they sit on the body, move with it, the special touches that only the wearer knows are there.
No Sacrifice of Quality
“The handwork is why we can’t get too big, even in ready-to-wear,” she explained. “If we did, we’d have to sacrifice the quality.”
“Chanel licenses nothing,” she added. Everything with the Chanel name is made by the firm.
“If we made bread, we’d grow the wheat to make the flour. We have a lifetime arrangement with the artisans who work for us. Many, such as the individual families who make the jewelry, the handbags and the belts in Europe, are third-generation crafts people working for Chanel. This purse,” she said, lifting her own quilted leather handbag with the signature chain handle, “was made by one person over two months’ time. He took pride in every inch of it. So if we miss a delivery here and there, or if we are short of stock in a particular item, we are not upset. We know that it all takes time.”
D’Alessio’s time with Chanel has won her the 1985 Council of Fashion Designers of America award for her role in revitalizing the image of Chanel in the United States.
