In 1953, Rose Macaulay published a book about ruins that ended in
surrender. Pleasure of Ruins is a four-hundred-page march through
the Western imagination's romance with broken stones: Roman ruins,
Mayan temples, the gothic abbeys English aristocrats had built in
their gardens just to watch them moulder. Macaulay wrote it a decade
after the Blitz had taken her Marylebone flat and her library, and
the book closes with a verdict she meant for the whole tradition.
Ruinenlust, she said, had
come full circle.
We had had our fill.
Thirty-nine years later, Karl Lagerfeld read the book and built a
couture collection out of it.
The
Chanel Spring 1992 haute couture show
was presented in Paris in January of that year, and even now it gets
cited more than almost anything else from Lagerfeld's tenure. Most of
the citations are for one dress: a slim black silhouette layered with
chunky gold-and-glass chain, worn down the runway by
Christy Turlington
and later, in the long afterlife of fashion images, by Penélope Cruz
in Broken Embraces and Lily-Rose Depp at the 2019 Met Gala. The dress was
also a brilliant marketing vehicle
for Chanel costume jewellery, which was the brand's most profitable
category at the time. A Trojan horse with chains.
The most interesting things in the collection were not the chains.
They were the jackets. Lagerfeld had built a series of trompe-l'œil
tweeds that were not tweed at all: they were raffia, painted in
watercolour to look like the house's signature weave. The tailoring
was so tight the jackets had to be zipped up the back rather than
buttoned at the front; gold jewelled buttons running down the lapels
were decoration, not closure. He called the silhouettes "diabolically
body-conscious," and looking at a single look the cameras kept, you can see what
he meant. A red-orange jacket structured into one architectural line.
Black opera gloves. The whole pose engineered around the absence of a
front opening.
The same logic carries through the rest of the collection.
A white jacket worn over gold leather trousers
repeats the architecture in a colder palette: dark trim and gilded
buttons running the lapels for show, a single real button doing the
actual work, the front pose engineered around the absence of a
closure to draw the eye to.
This is where the Macaulay reference starts to matter, and where it
also starts to look strange.
Lagerfeld's tattered chiffon skirts (separate from the jackets, but
shown alongside them) were the show's literal acknowledgement of
Pleasure of Ruins. Lagerfeld is the one who told the press the book
was on his mind, his favourite, the thing that pushed him toward the
deliberate decay of the silk. The trade press accepted the citation
at face value, then and now: Lagerfeld read a book about loving
ruins, and made some clothes about loving ruins. Done.
The trouble is that Pleasure of Ruins is not really a book about
loving ruins. Macaulay's argument, and you have to push past the
gorgeous central chapters about Pompeii and the Cambodian temples to
get there, is that the Romantic appetite for ruin was something
Europeans had earned through centuries of safe spectatorship, and
that the twentieth century had revoked the licence. The bombed
churches and cathedrals of postwar Europe gave her, she wrote,
"nothing but resentful sadness, like the bombed cities." Her closing
line is the one I quoted at the top. Ruinenlust was over. We were
finished with it.
So either Lagerfeld read the book against itself, mining the
picturesque chapters and ignoring the postwar conscience, or he
understood Macaulay perfectly and was making something more
complicated than the trade press credited him for. A couture show
built on an aesthetic the source text had already declared exhausted
is, at the very least, a knowing gesture. In the same show he wrapped
tree trunks in graffiti and floated bubbles down from the ceiling;
he was not above an inside joke. I think he was reading
Macaulay the way he read everything in his enormous, untouchable
library — not as a thesis to defend but as a quarry. He took what he
wanted and left the rest.
The Met has
a Lagerfeld Chanel piece from his Spring 1983 debut
in its collection. It is a black dress trimmed in trompe-l'œil baubles
made by the House of Lesage: fake jewels embroidered to look real.
Nine years before he zipped the backs of those raffia jackets, he was
already running this exact substitution. The jewels would not be
jewels. The tweed would not be tweed. The chain dress would be a
vehicle for the actual chains in the boutique. There is a coherence
to Lagerfeld's half-century at Chanel that has very little to do with
reverence for Coco and almost everything to do with what Suzy Menkes
once said — that Karl had to destroy Chanel or become a caricature of
her.
In January 1992, he picked up a book about the end of European
ruin-aesthetics and built a runway collection from it. Macaulay had
written a decade past the bombs that took her library, telling the
tradition to go home. He heard a different sentence and answered it.
Sources:
