Métiers d'Art

The inspiration for this year's Chanel's Metiers d'Art fashion show will come from Dallas, Texas - a cowboy hat-tilting nod to the place where Chanel's rebirth of her brand after a 15 year hiatus was met with a big warm American hug, ushering in a new era and relationship with the American market as opposed to the nervous European market, still caught up in the Nazi stench following WWII.

Fashion retailer Neiman Marcus was among the first to embrace the fashion house into his stores and truth be told upon her first visit to Texas in 1957, Coco Chanel was given a warm welcome that included being picked up at the airport in a white Rolls-Royce and being feted at a Western-themed party complete with a catwalk featuring cows.

Coco Chanel and Stanley Marcus, in 1957 at the infamous BBQ

"She was very mesmerized by the idea of Texas, so they threw a barbecue for her," Neiman Marcus fashion director Ken Downing recalls. "The story goes she actually didn't like the taste of the barbecue, and she tossed her plate under the table, which, as the story goes, it went all over Elizabeth Arden's red satin shoes."

Last nights festivities began with the premiere of a 20-minute film imagined, written and directed entirely by Lagerfeld titled, "The Return" that retraces the steps of Coco Chanel during this period.

 

The film was screened in an exhibition hall that had been transformed into a drive-in movie theater. Dozens of classic cars faced four screens. Lagerfeld, Vogue editor Anna Wintour and former Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley climbed into a black Cadillac convertible to take in the film.

Actresses Dakota Fanning and new face/muse of the pre-fall 2014 collection, Kristen Stewart

 

Chanel then turned one of the halls at Fair Park, Dallas' Art Deco exhibition venue, into a barn for the night, complete with a hay-scattered runway. Models in Western-style hats and boots wore outfits adorned with fringe, leather and feathers. The final model was dressed in an all-white ensemble that included fringed pants and a floor-grazing feather headdress.

 

Lagerfeld said after the show that he was inspired by "the idea of the old Texas, even before the Civil War." He noted that his cowboys were "not typical cowboys, they are transposed, very sophisticated".

 

After the runway show, guests partied in a recreation of a honky-tonk bar. Classic country music played while the well-heeled guests walked on a floor strewn with peanut shells and rode on mechanical bulls.

 

Sounds like my kind of party.