December 23, 2014 |
The searing heat in Dubai hits you as soon as you step off the plane. Actually, that’s a massive lie. The heat is contained, externalised. Dubai International Airport is ferociously air-conditioned, the pumping of the oxygen fluttering the almost-ubiquitous dishdashas of the Emirates and causing any square inch of European flesh to break out in goose pimples. We aren’t in there for long, whisked through a specially designated passport control like international diplomats. The flag we’re flying under has no colours, rather just a bold, monochrome insignia: a double-C, intertwined. No prizes for guessing who brought us here.
Dubai was the destination for Chanel’s 2015 cruise show. And while other labels are now jumping on the bandwagon and whisking press hundreds of miles abroad for an all-singing, all-dancing, all-sensory experience, Chanel were the ones who did it first. “We decided with Lagerfeld 15 years ago to make the ‘cruise’ a dedicated time to launch special collections and present them to the press within the setting of a huge show,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. He then reels off a litany of locations: “New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Venice, Saint Tropez, Cap d’Antibes, Versailles, and Singapore today it reached Dubai.”
Dubai is an odd locale for Chanel’s cruise collection, given the restrictions of sharia law, and Middle Eastern culture in general. Not to say that a cruise collection necessitates bared flesh and free-flowing champagne, but seldom are there fashion shows where they are entirely out of the question. And, of course, the white elephant in the room is the gay thing: Grindr shuts down when you enter Dubai airspace. A few of the fashion press questioned how they could function without its presence, a glowing amber beacon of sexual discovery in their sticky palm.
Then again, your grubby fingers shouldn’t be pawing at that in any case. We were in Dubai for business. Which is, in large part, what motivated Chanel to show there, too. “Dubai has become one of the most important destinations for us,” states Pavlosky with some zeal. “Following our Little Black Jacket exhibition in Dubai [April 2013], and the opening of our Mall of the Emirates and Dubai Mall boutiques in recent years, we are still developing and stabilising our organisation here in the UAE. This will be a completely unique show for Dubai, the Middle East and the world.”
Plenty of people say Dubai itself feels like one giant mall, with its mishmash of cod-historical postmodern architecture illuminated by neon, the city chopped into islands by bold, brash multiple-lane motorways filled with black, blacked-out Mercedes and Bentleys. And of course, Dubai is known for its islands – those manmade archipelagos that, from an aerial view (via private jet or helicopter), form the shape of, say, a map of the world or a couple of palm trees. They’re beset with difficulties – formed from sand dredged up from the seabed, some have insufficient defences against the ocean tide. Erosion is a major issue – The World is reputedly sinking back into the sea. A few are bordered with unsightly breakers that look like giant concrete equivalents of the metal cookie cutters that shape dough into bunnies or gingerbread men; they’re literally holding the land together.
And yet they’re an extraordinary achievement, a triumph of man over nature, much like Dubai, raised from the arid desert and shimmering like an oasis, except green with money rather than vegetation. Perhaps that’s what attracted Chanel, which in the 1970s was the fashion equivalent of a desert, barren and fruitless following the death of Mademoiselle Chanel in 1971 and the unsuccessful attempts to capitalise on the name via lacklustre ready-to-wear. Then Karl Lagerfeld joined in 1983, and brought Chanel back to life.
Today Chanel is arguably, the most successful fashion house in the world. No official figures for Chanel’s profits are released, but revenue is in the region of £5 billion annually. That is how Chanel can truck the fashion press thousands of miles to far-flung destinations, and erect spectacular backdrops to boot. Forget March’s supermarche or January’s haute couture discotheque. This time, the Chanel scenographers created a hypermodern harem, a cubic palace of vaguely Moorish, mashrabiya-inspired fretwork. It took two months and in the region of £1.5m to erect, alongside installing palm trees and picturesque Bedouin tents. The locale was The Island, one of those sandy man-made expanses that cluster in the waters of the Persian Gulf just off Dubai’s coast, this one privately owned by Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
“It is a kind of 21st-century oriental dream,” said Lagerfeld, languid and unflappable in the residual heat. The Chanel venue was air-conditioned, but the sand outside was not. Even after dusk, when the searing heat drops off somewhat, the ground was still warm to the touch. “It is very Chanel but Chanel had no time to explore, because this world didn’t exist in her days the way it exists now. But there was an inspiration from the past of that world.”
The clothes themselves were, like Dubai itself, a melange of past and present, to create a look for the future. “You see Dubai from an angle that you cannot imagine,” said Pavlovsky. “That’s part of the creativity of the brand, to find a way to show new angles to what you see. Everything has to be surprising.” Hence the fact that the glittering skyline of Dubai was ever visible through giant glass panes, millions of watts of electricity glowing like a utopian metropolis, despite the show echoing the Middle East past. Or maybe it was its imagined past – “We all know about Arabian Nights,” said Lagerfeld, as 1,000 people sat cross-legged, chewing on dates and pastries like the cortege of a European court paying homage to a Dubai dignitary.
We kind of were, of course. Lagerfeld wasn’t dubbed Kaiser Karl in the 1980s for nothing, and in Dubai he played Sheikh for Chanel. The collection whisked up every reference imaginable – oriental carpet or tile embroideries, glittering lamé, ruffles, harem trousers, tunics over dresses over dresses, multiple billowing jewelled layers – and hurled them at the models. “It has to do with Chanel of the 21st century, in a modern part of the world,” commented Lagerfeld. “Unrelated to the Old World, which is in a way, the New World, but it is a mix of the Old World and the New World. And this, I think, is interesting and exciting.”
The mix of old and new, East and West, was what made it modern – as well as distinctly Lagerfeld touches such as handbags shaped like jerry cans in chain-strapped quilted leather, or plexiglass like an industrial vat of Chanel No. 5. Those were the heavier, loaded pieces. Others were lighter, a touch less cynical. “You know the prints that I did are inspired by the 12th and 11thcenturies – in Spain, when it was Arabian – and in the north of Africa,” said Lagerfeld. “And it’s unbelievable how modern those flower patterns look nearly 1,000 years later.” As did dresses encrusted with sequins that, at first glance, seemed an abstract pattern of shards like shattered crystal, but later revealed themselves to be a skyline (not Dubai, but Dallas, a link to the pre-fall 2014 show of last December).
The leap between the two places isn’t so great: back in the 1980s, there were entire sections of haute couture shows dubbed “DD” by the press. That stood for “Dallas and Djeddah”, the Arabian spelling of the Saudi city. The link? Not just their shared incomes from oil ensuring that budding billionaires and potential couture clients are thick underfoot, waiting to be tapped, but aesthetics, too. Back then, they both gained a reputation for adoring anything glitzy, over the top and generally embellished to the hilt. Today, tastes are subtler, but there’s still a demand for exquisite craftsmanship regardless of price that labels like Chanel are keen to satisfy. The couture collection this year will be flown to Dubai, as well as to the Far East and New York, for international clients to make their orders. And order they will, no doubt lustily.
As for Lagerfeld’s debut Dubai reverie? It was ephemeral, temporal, fleeting. The next day, Chanel’s Dubai dream was dismantled. It disappeared, like a mirage. Until it hits 1,001 Chanel boutiques come November, that is.
By Alexander Fury
