FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY – The berg was not, as it appeared, a solid block of ice. It was many, a total of 240 tons of “snice,” or snow-ice, purportedly hacked from a glacier in Sweden, hauled to France in 15 tractor-trailers and installed in a specially built waterproof box at the Grand Palais.
There 35 artisans spent days sculpturing the 28-foot mountain of frozen water into an apparition that made the Chanel show on Tuesday one of the more unforgettable pieces of theater, fashion or otherwise, that most in the audience were likely to see. It was a National Geographic moment, a stunt of the sort only a designer like Karl Lagerfeld could come up with, or afford, thanks to the deep corporate pockets of Chanel.
But there was also a Woody Allen moment, and it occurred after the last of the models, clad in fake fur Wookie-wear, had sloshed through the puddles and offstage, and a small group of Mr. Lagerfeld’s industry friends tried to see and congratulate him.
For reasons that were not altogether clear but may have had something to do with pooled water and electrical cables lying about, the security guards formed a human wall blocking the Vogue editors Tonne Goodman and Grace Coddington; the Vanity Fair correspondent Ingrid Sischy; Lady Amanda Harlech; Babeth Djian, the editor of Numéro; and Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast International, from going backstage.
BlackBerrys were fired up. Frantic calls were dialed. Well-shod hooves were stamped. Ms. Sischy upbraided the security force, assuring them that Mr. Lagerfeld would be both furious and “triste” if prevented from seeing his adoring fans. But the guards would not be budged. Passage backstage was impossible!
Then, in an abrupt reversal familiar to anyone who has ever encountered French bureaucracy, they changed their minds. The guards moved away, and the small crowd surged en masse to where Mr. Lagerfeld posed beside his ice sculpture surrounded on three sides by television crews. Still separated from her friend and idol, Ms. Sischy called out plaintively.
“Karl, Karl, Karl,” she trilled, and for a moment one was not in Paris at all but on a floe in the Arctic Ocean, on a fragment of ice snapped off the glacial shelf. “Karl, Karl,” Ms. Sischy called, her cry like that of a baby seal.
The Party Chronicles
“People used to have fun,” said Stéphane Feugère, the indefatigable photographer who has spent the last eight years shooting fashion parties and people, on assignment for French Vogue.
“But then everyone got a camera,” Mr. Feugère added, “and now they all wait for someone else to have fun so they can shoot it.”
This was at the Maison Baccarat, once the hotel particulier of an immensely rich French aristocrat, a patroness of Cocteau, and now a museum of glass and a swank restaurant designed by Philippe Starck. A party was being held at the mansion in the 16th arrondissement by the people behind The Webster, a 20,000-square-foot multibrand luxury boutique in Miami Beach whose mastermind is the designer and fashion gadfly Milan Vukmirovic. The occasion was a dinner featuring a rare tasting of Louis XIII, an alarmingly expensive cognac (base price 1,500 euros a bottle, or $2,000, oligarchs take note) aged for decades or — in the case of the rarest vintage — for more than a century.
Despite Mr. Feugère’s observation, and every stereotype ever uttered about the abstemious ways of the French, people here do like a drink (even one administered, as the Louis XIII was, almost as a sacrament and in a thimble-size Perfection glass hand-blown by Baccarat).
They also enjoy other stimulating substances, of course, and if some of those people happen to be famous models grown wary of being surreptitiously snapped in mid-snort by someone’s phone camera, that explains why Mr. Feugère makes it a point, he said, to stay at the many fashionable parties he attends until all but the hardiest have called it quits. Read more »
