Known for his extravagant runway settings, designer Karl Lagerfeld led fashionistas into a serene garden on Tuesday at the Chanel haute couture catwalk show in Paris.
Having, in previous years, turned the Grand Palais into an airport, a supermarket and a brasserie, the designer, who has been at the creative helm of Chanel since 1983, sent models out of a wooden house down a garden path across a neat green lawn.
Lagerfeld said the starting point for the line was "the silhouette" and he puffed up sleeves into oval shapes on Chanel's signature tweed jackets paired with pencil-slim skirts.
In an age of technology, models, whose hair was swept back into moon-shaped chignons, wore belt pouches big enough to hold smartphones or tablets.
"There's an influence of everything," Lagerfeld told Reuters. "It's a kind of relax zen attitude in a modern spirit of today."
Evening wear consisted of embroidered strapless satin dresses and top and trouser combinations, worn with sparkling sheer capes.
Lagerfeld's nature theme was evident in the embroidery on dresses, including colorful flowers and wooden birds as well as in the shoes: rounded cork wedges.
Colors were shades of beige, ivory and gold with dabs of black and dark blue.
"You must not forget that in the [19]20s before she made a little black dress Chanel was called 'the queen of the beige',"Lagerfeld said, referring to founding designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel. "And I never made a Chanel collection nearly all beige."
Lagerfeld dressed his Chanel bride, a regular feature at his haute couture shows, in a strapless dress embroidered with chiffon, beads, rhinestones, leather and wood shavings, worn with a hooded jacket with a train.
The show ended with the panels of the wooden house opening to reveal the models, including Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, posing on the structure's three floors.
