In the second issue of Style.com/Print, the Fairchild fashion site’s semiannual magazine, Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld reserved his trademark trash talk for a woman who can’t tweet back: the late house matriarch, Coco Chanel.
Mr. Lagerfeld blamed her late-career decline on her belief, in the 1960s, that jeans and miniskirts were “vulgar.”
“The collections from the mid-’60s to the ’70s were quite ecchh,” he told the magazine. “Then they had 10 years of respect, for what it’s worth, then the rest is … me.”
Mr. Lagerfeld also corrected former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld on her house history, in a joint Q&A about their collaboration on Chanel book Little Black Jacket.
“The first Chanel jacket that I saw—that I knew was Chanel—was on TV,” Ms. Roitfeld, who is gearing up to launch her own semiannual pub in New York in September, said. “It was on Mrs. Kennedy—the pink one.”
“In 1963,” Mr. Lagerfeld responded. “It was a fake, a line-by-line copy by Cassini. She did have real Chanels, [but] her sister ordered them. We have all the proof.”
While the first issue of Style.com/Print diagrammed the cliques and crews of fashion week, the second highlights the individuals egos that still dictate what we wear. (Or so the spring spate of creative director hires and fires suggests.)
Asked about his own ouster from Yves St. Laurent, Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz sang “Que Sera, Sera” before telling the magazine, “As I say to people, I was never just Alber from Saint Laurent, and I am not Alber from Lanvin. I am Alber, period. That’s why I might have been hurt, but I was not dead. It didn’t kill me.”
Elsewhere in the issue, on newsstands April 2, Giorgio Armani confessed to wishing he’d been actor (Paul Newman, to be specific), and Georgina Chapman described dressing former professional wrestler Stacy Keibler for the Oscars.
“Our intention at the outset was to take the reader ‘behind closed doors,’” said Style.com editor Dirk Standen. “Fashion is an ever faster and increasingly complex industry, but at its core it still depends on one person—the designer—and his or her ability to find inspiration each season and use instinct and intelligence to carry the day. We wanted to celebrate these individuals in this issue and give readers a vivid sense of their struggles and rewards. As Alber Elbaz, the great creative director of Lanvin, told us, ‘Fashion is a business, but it works best as a family.’”
What was it Tolstoy said about families again?
