Chanel to show next Métiers d'Art collection in New York

By

Dominique Muret

Translated by
Nicola Mira

Published
Sep 4, 2018

After Rome, Paris and Hamburg, Chanel is heading overseas to the USA where, on December 4, it will showcase its Métiers d'Art 2018-19 collection. To host this year’s event, Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld has chosen the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue.

The Met is one of the world’s largest museums, exhibiting nearly 250,000 works of art from all over the world, spanning a period of 5,000 years. It is often a venue for fashion-themed shows, like the current, highly popular ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’ exhibition. Once again, Karl Lagerfeld has chosen an iconic cultural venue to host Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show. Last year, he picked the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in the HafenCity district of Hamburg, Germany, a state-of-the-art building designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
 
As Chanel explained in a press release, Lagerfeld is very fond of the US metropolis, which he often chose in the past as the backdrop to the label’s advertising campaigns. Also, he has previously staged two shows in New York: one for the ‘Paris-New York’ Métiers d'Art collection in December 2005, at the Chanel boutique on 57th Street, and another for the Cruise collection 2006, beneath Grand Central Station’s majestic dome.

New York has a special place in the history of the label owned by the Wertheimer family: in 1931, Gabrielle Chanel came to New York for the first time and, as the label evoked in the press release, “she was able to appreciate the success she had enjoyed in department stores since the creation of her first hats in 1912.”
 
The Métiers d’Art show is held once a year and was first introduced in 2002, to showcase the exceptional expertise of the arts and crafts experts who work for Chanel, among them the embroiderers from Maison Lesage and Atelier Montex, feather artisan Lemarié, shoemaker Massaro and milliner Maison Michel.
 
With creative director Karl Lagerfeld, “these artisans of the impossible,” as the Parisian maison defines them, “have successfully taken on the challenge of modernity and continuity, enabling their artistic heritage to thrive, steeping it in ever more daring creativity.”