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Wavetshirt - Cook Book Shirt

For a flock of coruscating jackets in Chanel’s fall 1996 haute couture collection, Lagerfeld called on Lesage to re-create the Cook Book Shirt moreover I love this elaborate Coromandel screens so beloved by the house’s founder. On Choi’s Fendi shift from spring 2014, a geometric pattern bolts down the front like a racing stripe.He loved that I lived in the middle of nowhere in Shropshire—maybe it reminded him of his childhood far from Hamburg in the pine forests—and he would send me boxes of books: books about women writers in the 18th century, biographies of Madame de Staël and Bess of Hardwick and Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, and wonderful books of great painters, particularly Manet, Monet, Picasso, Nolde, and the German Expressionists. He wanted to give “Wuthering Heights” (which is what he called my little farm) a library. Every year or so, he would threaten to visit me—“Where’s the nearest airport with a long runway for the private jet to land? You know Sébastien [Karl’s bodyguard and assistant, Sébastien Jondeau] and I are coming.” My mind would scramble, and I’d industrially clean the house—Karl was very critical of anyone’s home—dress up all my friends in long white aprons as staff, set-dress the house for a week beforehand, and organize a performance, like jumping my horse over the table outside laid for tea. He never came to stay in the end, which was sad, because he loved the Bloomsbury chaos that he divined from the iPhone photographs I would send him in response to his pictures of a château he had bought in Champagne—or his beloved Villa Louveciennes outside Paris, in which he never spent a single night.Karl would love to outrun time, stretching days into nights. Yet in the end, time outran him, as it will for all of us. He didn’t tell people that he was ill—only Sébastien. Of course we all knew, but we couldn’t prick the bubble of the lie—we couldn’t confront him, because mysteriously believing he could get better seemed to work. His resistance to weakness was so courageous, it was heartbreaking. Looking back, I see he did lay out truths, like white pebbles in the darkness, as a path to follow. His last couture—spring 2019—was a collection of all his favorite things in an idealized summer garden with a pool in front of an Italianate villa with curving steps like the ones at Villa Louveciennes, or his childhood home in Bissenmoor. Filled with decorative charm, it was an ode to couture and to luxury—from Madame de Pompadour’s porcelain flowers to the delicacy of tiered and pleated silk chiffon dresses that sang of his genius at Chloé in the 1970s, from the distilled tailoring that spoke of his eponymous label to the more extreme feathered and architectural shapes that recalled Fendi.FALLING WATER



At a glance, the Cook Book Shirt moreover I love this Brise dress from Chloé’s fall 1983 collection presents a dazzling spectacle: cascading layers of tubular pearls, sequins, and silver rhinestones against dark blue silk crepe. But peer a little closer, and the embroidered motif reveals itself to be…an open shower head? “I was tired of the usual decorations,” Lagerfeld explained to Vogue Paris that year. In This image: hair, Soichi Inagaki. Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions. Set Design: Ibby Njoya This silk muslin and pink organza dress comes alive with a cape of geometric mikado blooms, both from Chanel haute couture, spring 2010. The night before the show, we finished accessorizing each model—it must have been quite late—and he looked at me and asked what music I would have. It was more a question about what the collection meant to me, and I remembered my most romantic moment with my first-ever boyfriend, traveling around Europe looking at Byzantine churches. We were in Verona and heard the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto being played by a violinist on a rooftop—so I replied, “the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major.”


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