Chanel 2016 pre-autumn show: Karl Lagerfeld exports Paris to the Romans

The linguine-slim silhouette was, ultimately, about as Italian as it got

Paris is recreated in the Cinecittà studios for Chanel’s Métiers d’art show (Reuters)

In cinema, an auteur ranks as the sort of director whose stylistic stamp and personal control mark their productions, unmistakably, as their own, regardless of the collective effort it takes to achieve. In fashion, we have Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, the only designer today whose vision is similarly singular and all-encompassing. Indeed, it includes a biannual jaunt across the world, tentatively lassoed to the Chanel legacy – last May it was Dubai (pearls come from there); last winter Salzburg (Chanel based her cardigan suit on the city’s bell-hop uniforms, apparently).

In actual fact, those far-flung locales are simple expressions of the will of Lagerfeld and his boundless imagination. Thus, the fashion crowd made their way through the gates of Cinecittà, the epicentre of the Italian film industry dubbed Hollywood on the Tiber, for Chanel’s 2016 pre-autumn show.

What does all that have to do with Chanel, that most quintessential of French houses whose founder, Gabrielle Chanel, publicly detested her Roman-born rival Elsa Schiaparelli?

Well, I thought of the mantra of Cinecittà when founded under the yoke of Mussolini and his head of cinema, Luigi Freddi: “Il cinema è l’arma più forte” – “cinema is the most powerful weapon”. How true that rings of fashion today, packed as it habitually is, from front-row to advertising campaign, with Hollywood celebrities.

The actress Kristen Stewart, incidentally, starred in the latest of a series of film shorts Lagerfeld produces around his collections, each spinning an idiosyncratic storyline to justify the locale. That Stewart vehicle, titled, Once and Forever and setting Stewart on the set of a fictional biopic, was screened before this show – on a film lot used most recently for the television series Rome. Meta.

The Rome ended at the door: Chanel exported Paris to Rome, erecting an ersatz Parisian street scene in cinematic monochrome on Cinecittà’s lot No 5 (where else). The ingredients were Italian – tweed clerical capes, feathers painted to resemble travertine marble, dresses whorled with microscopic farfalle pasta recreated in kidskin and a caviar of pearls. Popes, pasta, basta. When in Rome...

It could have wound up like a great Italian dish: rich, a bit cheesy, too much to stomach in large quantities. But instead the mix was quintessentially Parisian, models treading the street in laddered chantilly stockings and slender lingerie silk dresses with pretty starched white collars, like a retinue of saucy French maids. Clever Karl: it’s easy for epic jaunts like this to feel laboured, and laborious to watch. The linguine-slim silhouette was, ultimately, about as Italian as it got. For a fundamentally French house, that’s no bad thing. I’m sure the clients would agree.