The Chanel brand lays claim to a mass culture bandwidth - as big as Disney, as bold as Coca Cola - while retaining a high culture price tag. This is exemplified in garments such as the teal Chanel Egypt Tweed jacket. This jacket is truly worthy of ancient Egyptian royalty as it has bold golds, saturated color, and stunning gripoix buttons.
To fully appreciate the Chanel Egypt Tweed jacket, it’s beneficial to understand the role of fur and leather in fashion history. Fur and leather have long been staples in the fashion world, with their luxurious texture and enduring appeal. Let's take a look at the history of fur and leather in fashion.
A Brief History of Fur and Leather in Fashion
Fur has been used by humans for thousands of years, both for practical purposes such as warmth and for decorative purposes. In ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, and Rome, fur was a symbol of wealth and status, with the wealthy class frequently adorning themselves in fur garments. Fur continued to be popular throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, with both men and women wearing fur-lined cloaks and other garments to stay warm in the cold European winters.
In the modern era, fur became even more popular in the fashion world. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, fur was a common material for coats, stoles, and other outerwear. In the 1920s and 1930s, the popularity of fur reached new heights, with designers such as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli incorporating fur into their collections.
Leather has also been used by humans for thousands of years, with the first known use of leather dating back to ancient Egypt. In the past, leather was primarily used for practical purposes such as footwear and belts, but it has also been used for decorative purposes such as clothing and accessories. In the modern era, leather has become a popular material for a wide range of garments, including jackets, skirts, and handbags.
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These materials have played a significant role in the history of fashion and will continue to do so in the future.
The Chanel Egypt Tweed Jacket: A Modern Masterpiece
Please meet the teal Chanel Egypt Tweed jacket. The crown jewel of the Chanel jacket kingdom and the most spectacular piece from Karl Lagerfeld’s 2018-19 pre-fall métiers d’art collection. It became his final collection as he passed away within a short period after the launch. This collection’s name is Paris - New York. Although the New York influence is present, most of the collection took inspiration from ancient Egyptian civilization.
This particular jacket is the only solid-colored tweed jacket in the entire collection. It’s nearly impossible to find in the secondary market. If you own one, you are lucky. The collection holds great significance as it marks Karl’s final endeavor. This teal number is definitely the pièce de résistance of the entire collection. It’s exquisite. Its ornate design makes it hard to pull it off as a casual jacket.
According to Page Six, celebs like Diane Kruger, Lily-Rose Depp and Marion Cotillard looked on while the glinting models strutted around the relics. The show was devised to showcase the craftmanship of the 26 specialist ateliers owned by Chanel.
Chanel's Métiers d'Art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Design and Details
The Chanel Egypt jacket’s tweed is insanely gorgeous lesage tweed. You can see the intricate woven details. Most of the Lesage tweed consists of monochromatic threads of blue, turquoise, and teal. The pink is the most unexpected element of this tweed. The buttons on this jacket from the Egypt collection are gripoix style. The gold is not bright and shiny. It’s got an aged feel to it. The buttons on the sleeves are slightly smaller. There are two buttons on the sleeves. One unexpected design element is the asymmetrical split at the bottom. Also to note, I am not a fan of how the gap looks uneven at the pockets.
The fit of this jacket is fairly boxy, like many Chanel jackets. This jacket is fairly heavy, as you would expect from most jackets in pre-fall collections. The lining is matching teal. It does not have micro CC’s. This jacket would have plenty of room for alterations. My new Chanel purchase came with a lesage tweed fabric, lining fabric, and 4 spare buttons. Note that I purchased a size 44 jacket and got it taken into 40, which was my size at the time.
The Bouclé Jacket
The new design, which would come to be known as the Bouclé Jacket, was inspired by menswear, with a straight and fluid shape that allowed complete freedom of movement. The jacket featured four real pockets, a braid in either matching or contrasting colour tones, Chanel stamped buttons with holes in them (a revelation at the time) and multiple panels which meant that it could be adjusted a few sizes up or down depending on the individual woman’s size. Initially worn by older, wealthier women, the Bouclé Jacket became a fashion must-have when it was adopted by famed style icon, Jackie Kennedy.
Through the years, the Bouclé Jacket has endured as a timeless piece, eternally in vogue and worn by everyone from royalty, to celebrities, to the girl next door. It can be dressed up, or down, used in formal attire, or casual, and there are always countless versions, reincarnations and re-imaginings of this classic jacket available, from the most esteemed of high-end fashion labels down to the most accessible of high street stores. As Karl Lagerfield famously declared: ‘Some things never go out of fashion.
Chanel's Métiers d'Art Show at the Met
When Coco Chanel visited New York in 1931, the Chicago Daily Tribune noted that she arrived with two assistants, three maids, 15 trunks and 35 additional pieces of luggage. Eighty-seven years later, the house she founded still travels in style.
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On Tuesday the Metropolitan Museum of Art rolled out the red carpet for Chanel and hosted its first fashion show in three decades, turning the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing into a catwalk for Karl Lagerfeld’s Metiers d’Art collection.
Chanel aligns itself with icons wherever it goes. When Lagerfeld is in New York, the city’s grandest museum becomes a catwalk, and the show is advertised all over the city; posters depict Coco as the Statue of Liberty, sporting a spiked crown with her little tweed suit, flaming torch aloft.
The messaging of Metiers d’Art is to remind the world of the sophistication and savoir-faire of Chanel.
In this show, staged in a treasure of Ancient Egypt now housed a few blocks from the art deco skyscrapers, he sent out slender metallic columns whose burnished dazzle and geometric angles called to mind both the treasures of Tutankhamun and the Chrysler building.
The classic Chanel suit came with an extra wide, round collar and a side order of heavy eyeliner, for a look that nodded to power dressing both in its Wall Street incarnation and in the heavily ornamented collars worn by the Ancient Egyptian elite.
Mixed in with scarab-beetle handbags and pyramid embroidery, graffitied dresses designed in collaboration with the artist Cyril Kongo paid homage to New York street culture and to hieroglyphics. It would be glib, if it wasn’t so fiendishly cleverly done. “Only Karl can do this,” said Pavlovsky. “We are very lucky, because we have the best designer ever.”
Two-thirds of the New York show audience was made up of Chanel’s best US customers. “Our American customer base is growing. In the last two years, the number of American clients placing orders for haute couture has increased,” said Pavlovsky.
London, where Chanel’s global headquarters are based, remained an important market also, he noted. “But, of course, with Brexit there is a big question mark over 2019.”
For luxury powerhouses with money to spend on standalone fashion spectaculars, New York City is now the place to be. Chanel arrived hot on the heels of Versace, who showed at the New York stock exchange on Sunday.
Pharrell has snatched all the headlines following this weekend's Chanel Métiers d'Art: Chanel's annual Met-hosted winter runway, which honors the craftmanship of all the brand's partners. Looking like an art-deco pharaoh, the rapper-producer-mogul donned a sparkly gold ribbed turtleneck with a rhinestone-mosaic collar, gold lamé glam rock trousers and boots, topped off with Cleopatra-worthy eyeliner.
His look might have been the least subtle example of the ancient Egypt inspiration for the collection, which, staged at the Met's Temple of Dendur exhibit was full of gold, collar-style jewelry, beading and regal shapes - which some are pointing out, at times strayed "uncomfortably close" to Liz Taylor's controversial portrayal of Cleopatra.
This week the brand became the latest fashion giant to ban the use of exotic skin and fur. “It has become increasingly difficult to source exotic skins that match our ethical standards,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. “Meanwhile we are investing a lot in research and development, and the innovations in alternative materials that are happening in our ateliers are phenomenal.”
What looked like crocodile on the catwalk at the Met was in fact mock croc; what looked like lizard was vegan pineapple leather.
Metiers d’art is a fashion genre unique to Chanel, devised to showcase the craftmanship of the 26 specialist ateliers owned by Chanel, from embroidery and featherwork to glovemaking and pleating.
The clothes are demi-couture: intensively hand-worked but sold on the shop floor rather than made to order in the pure tradition of haute couture.
The power play of staging a blow-the-budget fashion show in a landmark museum is blunt. But Lagerfeld’s genius is in adding sufficient nuance to make a blockbuster interesting, and finding visual synergies that make his collections uniquely satisfying to watch - the fashion equivalent of a pop song with an earworm of a chorus.
Annual professional cleaning and off-season storage are important and inexpensive ways to ensure and prolong the life of your fur.
Fur is longer lasting and more adaptable to fashion changes than most other materials. As styles change, your fur can be updated and re-styled to reflect the latest fashions time and time again.
Savoir-faire of the Métiers d'Art 2014/15 Paris-Salzburg Collection – CHANEL Shows
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