looking back

Sometimes, in the middle of all the fuss about upcoming trends and directions for fall and trying to balance them with the not-quite-over trends for spring and all the whatevers that have been appearing in magazines about the importance of prefall and resort, it's nice to just think about clothes in terms of what's pretty and what isn't.

I was looking through some old images on the Chanel website of the Paris-Monte Carlo collection, which I believe showed in December last year. When you think about it, the non-stop stream of collections Chanel churns out all year round - fall and spring, resort, prefall, haute couture spring and fall, and all these little ones in between like Paris-Monte Carlo etc etc - Chanel has quite a bit in common those high street stores that has new clothes in every two weeks, but more luxe of course. All in the name of keeping shoppers coming back. Very nice.

That said, these in-between collections (my term for the collections that fall outside the traditional fashion weeks) are somewhat more interesting than the main ones. I barely remember what Chanel is offering for the coming fall, but I LOVE this Paris-Monte Carlo collection -

Ballet (specifically, Coco Chanel's costumes for 'Le Train Bleu') was the core influence (my favourite collections always have ballet as a core influence) and all this stuff is also wonderfully classic Chanel, but not stuffy. I'm always amazed that the signatures of Chanel have endured all these years, and can be easily tweaked to fit into the wardrobes of everyday modern women. (Some thanks is in order for the genius of Karl Lagerfeld here.) Directional and breathtaking as Balenciaga might be, I prefer the ease of what Mme Chanel pioneered.

I especially love her ankle-length evening looks, redone by Mr Lagerfeld -

Timeless is timeless. This collection could be 20 years old, or one, and I would still love it. I think one might could question whether there's a need to put out so many collections each year, and frankly, we could do without some of them (the latest Cruise collection springs to mind) but this collection is a good argument for all the good ideas that could come out from Mr Lagerfeld's head.

Pictures taken from www.chanel.com