If all roads lead to Rome, then which roads lead to Paris? For Chanel’s 13th Métiers d’Art show, Karl Lagerfeld took to the back lots of the famous Cinecittà film studios in Rome to show the luxury brand’s pre-fall 2016 collection. Since Lagerfeld’s reign at Chanel, his Métiers d’Art shows have become legendary: a rodeo in Dallas (Paris in Dallas), a barge in Shanghai (Paris in Shanghai), a hotel in Salzburg (Paris in Salzburg) – the list goes on. The shows aren’t just bombastic gestures of wealth; their intention is also to celebrate the artisans around the world that contribute to the work of Chanel’s collections, from lace to buttonry to embroidery. But Lagerfeld’s decision to create a vintage Parisian set on Teatro No. 5, replete with bistro tables, a boulangerie, a cinema, a metro station, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in real Paris, had a deeper, more poetic and darkly coincidental meaning. The show, planned well before the attacks, was a cinematic love letter to Paris. Lagerfeld remarked: “I wanted to create a homage to Paris. The best Paris, the most romantic Paris and to nostalgia for an idealized version of the city that never really existed.” The Cinecittà, otherwise known as Hollywood on the Tiber, was built by Benito Mussolini in 1937 in a scheme to revive the Italian film industry – later, such classics as La Dolce Vita and Satyricon were filmed there. In Dustin Lynn’s own cinematic portrait of Métiers d’Art show, set to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd and a spoken word piece by film legend Jean-Luc Godard, a modern Rome and a modern Paris clashes with a make-believe, Charles de Gaulle-era Paris. Then there are the models walking the runway, the high fashion, and the after party – just to remind us that it is all just fantasy.
