On Tuesday after the market close Chanel, a bellwether for the luxury industry, announced a 16% increase in revenues for 2023 for a total of $20 billion. On this great news the luxury stocks promptly lost 2% the next day, their biggest loss in a month. What gives?
We reconnect with the journalist Amy Odell to discuss the problematic legacy of Karl Lagerfeld, the late designer of Chanel, and the new exhibit devoted to his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We try to answer one of the central questions of creativity – can you separate the art from the artist? – and dive into other aspects of Lagerfeld’s life and work.
Several days ago we learned of the passing of the milliner and hairdresser Katsuyo Kamo. He was one of the most creative and sought after collaborators, working with Undercover, Junya Watanabe, Anrealage in Japan, and Europeans like Haider Ackermann, Chanel, and Fendi. His incredibly headpieces were especially indispensable to the image-making at Undercover, whose designer Jun Takahashi counted Kamo as a friend.
If you cannot make it to the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit at the Met Museum in New York, you can still get the accompanying catalog, published by Yale University Press in association with the museum.
Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, the new fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is marketed as the biggest one its Costume Institute has put on to date.
Last week marked the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that radically changed the political landscape of the world. There were memorial services held in New York and across the United States. The Givenchy Spring/Summer 2016 show was another unlikely place where 9/11 was invoked. The show was held at pier with a view of the new Freedom Tower, and was art-directed by Marina Abramovic. The presentation was supposed to pay respects to 9/11 and celebrate the spirit of human unity. The entire thing – from having an Italian designer who works for a Parisian house preaching to New Yorkers to Givenchy offering special guests tours of the 9/11 memorial – was tone-deaf, if not insulting. There was not a shred of the political in the clothes he presented, making the show’s art direction even more jarring as mere trappings.