DUBAI: Arab influencers Lana El-Sahely and Jessica Kahawaty wrapped up Paris Fashion Week in style as they attended the final runway show of the season on Tuesday evening.
Despite an exhausting schedule of shows, fittings and photoshoots, the end of fashion week did not offer either influencer a chance to relax — El-Sahely worked on a “final project” at 10:45 p.m. before jetting home in the early hours of Wednesday morning and Kahawaty hopped on a flight to her next destination just hours after attending the Louis Vuitton show.
Designer Nicolas Ghesquiere had teased that his Louis Vuitton, the last on the calendar, would be a “shock.”
He wasn’t kidding. While guests, including a black-clad Kahawaty and an all-denim El-Sahely, had been invited to the Louvre Museum in the center of the French capital, when they took their seats they actually found themselves in the Pompidou Center, a kilometer away to the east.
This wasn’t some sort teleporter trick from “Star Trek.” Ghesquiere had recreated the groundbreaking architecture of the Pompidou’s modern art galleries inside the Louvre — “a museum inside a museum” — to demonstrate the shock of the new, The Associated Press reported.
And his clothes for Autumn/Winter 2019-20 were just as tricksy, mixing stripes, checks, floral and all sorts of prints and patterns in what the New York Times’s Vanessa Friedman quickly called a “good taste, bad taste mash up.”
On the last of nine packed days of shows, it was hard for some exhausted fashionistas to get their heads round, particularly as many had shed a silent tear earlier in the day as the late Karl Lagerfeld’s final collection was shown at Chanel.
Celebrities, models and fashion industry peers who had gathered at Chanel’s catwalk show Tuesday held a minute’s silence to bid adieu to the iconic couturier, who died last month and did not want a public funeral, AFP reported.
Guests wept as his final collection for the Parisian house, co-designed by new artistic director Virginie Viard, was then presented at Paris’ Grand Palais amid a cinematographic set: a mountain village covered in peaceful snow high above the clouds.
The display featured both genuine emotion and ironic spectacle, Lagerfeld’s trademark.
Ahead of the runway show, its models, including Cruz, stood solemnly in the fake snow by an Alpine chalet and resting ski equipment. A gentle bell rang out as poignant recordings of Lagerfeld’s voice boomed out and echoed across the vast venue.
Guests including actresses Marion Cotillard and Kristen Stewart, models Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell, singer Janelle Monae and U.S. Vogue Editor Anna Wintour observed a one-minute silence. Many wept.
In a moment that perfectly captured Lagerfeld’s universe, the initial silence was interrupted by the bark of a small white dog kept in a sparkling Chanel shopping basket by a front-row guest.
