My Life and Times

Karl Lagerfeld
1925 A little black chiffon dress, part of the Chanel exhibition that opens this week at the Met

May 1, 2005
A Peek Into Coco's Closet
By CATHY HORYN

EVER since Gabrielle Chanel's death on Jan. 10, 1971, people have been asking the same question about her: "What would Coco think?" No designer has provoked more curiosity from the grave. If Chanel was one of the most opinionated women in Paris, capable of the mean remark as well as the sensible, she was not alone in creative power. Dior and Balenciaga also left large legacies. But nobody ever asks what they would think.

It may be that Chanel, the orphan girl whose life was an embroidery of lies, who kept (and was kept by) a string of wealthy lovers, who created her style after her own free-spirited image - it may be that she possessed something her rivals did not: a cult of personality. Dior died in the spa town of Montecatini after ingesting, it was said, a fatal helping of foie gras. Balenciaga simply closed the doors of his couture house one day and returned to his native Spain. In journalistic terms, they did not make good copy.

Chanel, on the other hand, has been the subject of numerous biographies, exhibitions and stage and film treatments, including the 1970 Broadway musical "Coco" that starred a knobby Katharine Hepburn in pearls and tweeds. Chanel No. 5, the perfume she created at the start of the Roaring Twenties, bottling it in a plain pharmaceutical flacon, is today the top-selling fragrance in the world. And of course in the 22 years since Karl Lagerfeld took over the designs for the house, amplifying and subverting her themes, to the point of putting her likeness on baubles, her cult has only grown. Everyone knows something about the woman even if they don't know everything about what made her a genius of modernism.

On Wednesday a new Chanel exhibition opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, five years after a previously planned show was canceled over objections about its focus, and Mr. Lagerfeld and the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, publicly spatted. (It continues through Aug. 7.) As Mr. Lagerfeld, who wanted an installation that would include works by contemporary artists, said at the time, "I'm not interested in an exhibit that's just old dresses."

Mr. Lagerfeld had no direct involvement in this exhibition, said its curators, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton of the Met's Costume Institute. He did, however, provide certain insights about Chanel's work, and he approved the choice of Olivier Saillard, a well-known curator in Paris, to design the white Corbusier-like grid of boxes in which 60 examples of both Chanel's original pieces and Mr. Lagerfeld's interpretations will be minimally displayed. These will be interspersed with cases of jewelry, both real and costume, and three separate cubes in which a video artist has created abstract montages of Chanel motifs, like sequins and the famous Coromandel screens from her Paris apartment.

Given the show's starkly conceptual design, which includes no biographical references - not even so much as a Beaton portrait - and the proprietary way that people feel about Chanel, it will not be surprising if many of the 400,000 expected visitors frown and say to themselves, "What would Coco think?"

Mr. Koda acknowledges that visitors expecting to see a soup-to-nuts retrospective will be disappointed, even outraged. "My fear is that all the people who are completely immersed in Chanel, and there a lot of women who wear only Chanel, are going to be mad," he said. "Because we don't have their Chanels in the exhibition. That's my nightmare."

In a sense, the curators say, the largest obstacle to mounting a Chanel exhibition is not the persnickety, tweed-clad museumgoer, or the all-knowing Mr. Lagerfeld, or the Chanel corporation, which is a sponsor of the show. (Its pledge has not been made public but it is likely to be close to, if not exceed, the $1.5 million the company had expected to give in 2000.) The real obstacle is Chanel herself. Her designs were amazingly contemporary. But, as Mr. Koda suggests, just because a satin evening dress from 1931 could be worn today doesn't communicate what makes a Chanel uniquely a Chanel.

"Unlike Schiaparelli or Dior, she was such a modernist in the truest sense of addressing women and their comfort," Mr. Koda said, adding that he and Mr. Bolton felt that a retrospective would have obscured this central theme. "People would have gone through the exhibit and said, 'Oh, my God, this is so beautiful I wish I saw that at Bergdorf's,' " Mr. Koda said, with a laugh. "But it wouldn't have seemed like a fashion exhibition. What we wanted to underscore was that she was a designer."

Included in the exhibition are original examples of beauty products from the Chanel archive in Paris, like an after-swim powder and a self-tanning cream that she developed in the 20's. The curators say these show that her modernist vision wasn't limited to little black dresses or the use of nautical jersey.

When the museum returned to the idea of a Chanel exhibition, last spring, Mr. Koda's plan was to include pieces by Mr. Lagerfeld. He said he felt that designs like Mr. Lagerfeld's quilted leather motorcycle ensemble would help "spice up" the period garments and give young visitors a means of relating to the past. "We're really using Karl's work as a medium," Mr. Koda said, adding, "It's hard to see what is instinctively Chanel until you see his riff on it." The first garment that people will see is a highly reverential sequined dress designed by Mr. Lagerfeld and based on one Chanel wore for a sitting with Beaton.

Though Chanel originals dominate the show, some purists may object to the inclusion of Mr. Lagerfeld's work, or see what value it lends beyond "spice." In recent years museums have been accused of allowing their subjects too much influence through their sponsorship. In 1999 the Brooklyn Museum was criticized for taking contributions for "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection" from companies and individuals with a commercial interest in the works. And the Guggenheim Museum was criticized for accepting millions of dollars from Giorgio Armani, who was also directly involved in a retrospective of his fashion.

Mr. Koda said that while Mr. Lagerfeld was not involved, and made no attempt to interfere in the selections for the exhibition, it would have been unthinkable not to ask for his aesthetic opinions. "No one knows the iconography of Chanel better than Karl," Mr. Koda said. Still, the invisible hand of Mr. Lagerfeld may be felt in unexpected ways. He colored the black-and-white photographs for the exhibit's catalog, and he has lent the house's chief hairdresser, Odile Gilbert, to see that the mannequins' feathered caps look right.

A museum can also be sensitive to a fault. The curators wanted to use Chanel's original 1921 logo, only slightly different from the one that now appears on shopping bags, at the entrance of the show. "We could rationalize it - this was history," Mr. Koda said. "But it looked too corporate." He added, "It's a problem, but the reason for the problem is actually the argument for the show. She was a modernist."

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