WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

Since 2002, Chanel’s Métiers d’Art shows have paid homage to the fine craftsmanship that its artisan partners bring to the house’s collections. With a runway show that takes place outside the traditional fashion schedule each year, Chanel turns to a different location to pay tribute to the ateliers that provide the maison with everything from lace to silver buttons and fine embroidery work. Just as Chanel brought the house’s fournisseurs back to life from near extinction via their Paraffection subsidiary company, Napoleon’s entourage revived Egypt’s ancient civilization through their comprehensive ten volume catalogue of images entitled Description de I'Egypte, which incidentally included a section dedicated specifically to Arts et Métiers (Arts & Crafts)… And so, Ancient Egypt seemed especially fitting as a motif for Karl Lagerfeld’s 2019 Chanel Métiers d’Art collection. Though each runway look seemed to be blessed by the Egyptian Gods, it was the details in particular, that made one feel as if the pages of Description de l'Égypte were coming to life on the catwalk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the magnificent 10 B.C. Temple of Dendur appropriately acted as the show’s backdrop… As Lagerfeld once said “Nothing is more modern than antiquity.”

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte launched an expedition of 35,000 soldiers to conquer Egypt. The campaign was a military and political disaster but nonetheless it had a profound and lasting impact, by revealing the splendour of a mysterious and forgotten civilization. For Napoleon's ships also carried some 500 scholars, scientists and artists whose task it was to study the country and its customs. Traversing a country at war under the stifling heat of southern Egypt, they embarked on the first major study of a land then all but unknown to Europeans. They discovered the Valley of the Kings and the Rosetta stone which when deciphered enabled scholars to read hieroglyphics. Their combined efforts culminated in what is surely one of the most ambitiously comprehensive works ever published: the Description de I'Egypte in 10 volumes with 837 copperplate engravings and more than 3,000 drawings.