Watching the Chanel Couture episode of “7 Days Out”, a Netflix series on how major events come to life, it’s hard to think the world of fashion makes any sense.
The majestic, unnecessarily overproduced, extravagant and shamelessly luxurious fashion event is a massive logistical undertaking that involves hundreds of people, from lighting specialists to fabric flowers manufacturers. The surreal stage for the Spring 2018 fashion show was a recreation of a Parisian garden, with a functional fountain in the middle and thousands of real flowers, a true dreamland from the mind of no other than Mr. Karl Lagerfeld himself, Chanel’s Creative Director since 1983.
Throughout the episode, you hear from a lot of the people doing the heavy-lifting, like sewing the clothes, setting the stage, scheduling models, getting raw materials. You also hear from Mr. Lagerfeld and his approach to getting his vision through the team. I couldn’t help bu notice that the stress and man hours to glory and fame ratio was a bit off.
I understand that the vision and “style guide” for the brand is valuable and it’s at the core of what we know to be Chanel’s essence, but if I was designing the future, I’m not sure I would give all the glory to a guy that makes a few sketches and zero public recognition to the people truing that into actual clothes in spite of the unrealistic standards and extreme lack of specificity set by the designer in these sketches.
The piece does not show all the steps needed to make the show happen, so there is a possibility that many more specifics are given to the team to execute the collection, but the Creative Director’s guidelines were depicted as a few sketches and one live session reviewing the final creations two days before the show.
The women making the clothes go through multiple hurdles to get the raw materials on time, to ensure all the clothes fit correctly on each model and, of course, working with their hands for hours to achieve the perfection that is expected of them.
The day of the show, you can see how a large team of models, seamstresses and stage people start their day 4 hours before the show to start preparing for the big event. Lagerfeld makes his appearance about 45 minutes before the show and it didn’t seem he did anything close to working.
After watching this, I was left with a sense of disappointment at myself and all of us fashion lovers for propagating a business model that allows for such uneven recognition to the real heroes (and for being part of the mass hysteria that brings people to think that spending millions of dollars in a fashion show is acceptable).
Mr. Lagerfeld recognizes that this is a team effort and says he is lucky to work with the people he works with, so it’s not really his fault that the industry puts all the credit in a few people. It is our fault.
