Lessons From Karl Lagerfeld For Chanel’s Next Designer

LONDON — On February 19, 2019, I was sitting in a cafe around the corner from BoF’s old offices on Great Titchfield Street with our chief technology officer, Walter Badillo, when I received a text message. Karl Lagerfeld — the designer who had become a global symbol of the fashion industry — had died.

I was surprised by the sadness and grief that washed over me. Tears came to my eyes as I started to think back to all the times I had seen Karl over the years. We met so many times before and after his Chanel and Fendi shows I had lost count, but perhaps our most memorable encounter was our first: back in February 2011, when I was suddenly given the opportunity to interview him — with only 10 minutes notice.

I was at Suzy Menkes’ International Herald Tribune conference in London. BoF was only three years old. I was walking the halls of the InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane after Suzy had just done a very rare live public interview with Karl on stage when someone from The Luxury Channel pulled me aside and asked me if I’d like to ask Karl Lagerfeld a few questions for their video series. I couldn’t believe it! I said yes and then quickly realised I had no idea what to ask him. (I ended up asking him about Facebook, but that is a whole other story.)

Now, as speculation mounts over who will become Chanel’s next creative director, I have been thinking back to what made Karl such an exceptional success. On stage with Suzy, Karl shared his thoughts on Coco Chanel, and where she went wrong, and how he was able to revitalise Chanel, making it one of the most desirable luxury brands in the world.

Karl understood that the brand’s roots in the rigorous world of Haute Couture were essential to its future, but he also knew it was time for a shake-up. “When I took Chanel over, everybody said to me, ‘Don’t touch it, it’s dead,” he told Suzy. “In a way, she had made two mistakes in the end of her career. When the 60′s started — and there was certainly this movement of youth — she wanted to give lessons of elegance, so she decided miniskirts were horrible. Number two, she started to say blue jeans are horrible. You know, that was the fashion of the world of that moment. Nobody wanted to be told by an old lady that mini-skirts and jeans are not chic. The result was, she lost her power, and in the end nobody cared.”

Karl frequently quoted Goethe when explaining his strategy for Chanel: “Make a better future with the expanded elements of the past.” This was also captured in one of his now iconic illustrations from 1991, which I referred to a lot when I first started working in the luxury sector.

After taking over at Chanel in 1983, Karl managed to revitalise the house by unearthing and reanimating its codes, turning them into powerful signifiers of what would become a global fashion cult. This approach has now become part of the standard luxury playbook, but nobody has since done it better than Karl at Chanel, in part because the brand had such a rich lexicon for him to work with: there was the camellia flower, the quilted bag, the tweed suit, the bi-colour patent shoe and of course the interlocking C’s logo.

Today, Chanel is at another critical moment.

Although some critics (and even some customers) did not appreciate Lagerfeld’s ready-to-wear designs for Chanel, there’s no doubt that he catapulted the brand into the cultural consciousness, with his savvy society connections, and ability to read the zeitgeist. That hasn’t been the case since his death. And Chanel is a weaker brand as a result. That doesn’t mean Chanel hasn’t been part of the conversation. It has, but not for the right reasons, from online critique of its recent runway shows to reports of diminished manufacturing quality.

What does this mean for Chanel’s next designer?

Maintain Elevated Image: When Chanel has taken risks recently, it has sometimes backfired. Alarm bells were set off after a poorly conceived and executed cruise show in Marseille this past March. Chanel’s official Instagram post about the show received a considerable number of negative comments, with followers expressing disappointment and urging the brand to return to its roots.

Emphasise Creative Innovation: But the codes of Chanel are now so well defined that while they will always bear repeating, customers are looking for more from the brand. This is the time to leverage Chanel’s unparalleled access to craftsmanship and savoir faire — and modernise it. In the right hands, Chanel’s exceptional metiers d’arts houses Goossens, Lemarié, Lesage, Massaro,, Maison Michel and others, are waiting for someone to come in and make them sing. Creative innovation is what really justifies the price point at Chanel.

Deliver Quality First: There also have been numerous complaints about the brand’s decline in quality amid rapid price increases that have seen the core 2.55 flap bag go up 91 percent from €5,800 in 2019 to €11,100 this year. The new creative director will need to insist that the brand’s products deliver the quality that customers expect. An incessant focus on delivering on these expectations is essential to winning back the trust of customers.

Make it Experiential: Recent Chanel shows have often started with films featuring some of the brand’s celebrity friends like Brad Pitt and Penélope Cruz, but there is nothing that takes the energy out of a show than plunging the audience into darkness and looking at a screen when all of us are looking at screens most of the day anyway. The magic of Karl’s shows was that, even before Instagram made shows visible to people far beyond fashion insiders, he transported us into a different world that only he and Chanel could take us into. With the budgets available to create moments like that at Chanel, the new creative director has pretty much unlimited opportunity to make the Chanel brand come to life. The brand already does a good job at the client experience around the shows, but more innovative and unexpected experiential elements would make this even better — and deliver an online return as well.

Go Global: In recent years, Chanel has been its best when it has taken the brand out of the confines of its historic French bourgeois roots and gone to Dakar, Senegal or most recently, to Hangzhou, China, to show how the brand is connected to global culture. Chanel already has an ambitious and interesting global culture programme, but it can feel somewhat separate from the creativity of the designer. The new creative director could take this even further, leveraging culture and craftsmanship from other parts of the world (a strategy rival Dior has done well in India under Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tenure) and casting a more interesting and eclectic set of brand ambassadors that are not so predictable. This combination could make Chanel a true cultural leader.

These are all things that Matthieu Blazy, the rumoured frontrunner for the creative director role, has done exceptionally well at Bottega Veneta, a much smaller house with fewer codes to work with, but with which he has had a huge creative and cultural impact nonetheless. The more I think about it, the more I think he is an inspired choice for the role, as he has evidently been able to blend craftsmanship, creative innovation and global cultural references into his work, in a way that feels exciting and modern.

In the end, whomever the new creative director is, they would do well to keep Karl’s original philosophy in mind.

“I try not to make it something old-fashioned but rather a reflection of the moment. Chanel is a modern look; the style and attitude, created by Coco, must be updated to stay in line with the present and fashion,” Karl told Le Monde. “I keep the classics and adapt them to the spirit of the times and I always keep in mind these words of Goethe that I love so much: “create a better future with the expanded elements of the past.”

This Weekend on the BoF Podcast

Many fashion brands are realising that operating across multiple cultural sectors is a business necessity. In our social feeds, fashion competes with music, film, and sports for our attention.

Learning how to tap into other cultural sectors is something that many fashion brands are trying to do, but few have done it better than this week’s guests.

At BoF VOICES 2024, BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed spoke with Jens Grede, co-founder and CEO of Kim Kardashian’s Skims, the shapewear brand and David Allemann, co-founder and executive co-chairman of the Swiss sportswear company On, to learn how they’ve tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, especially at the growing intersection of sports and fashion.

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Imran Amed, Founder and CEO, The Business of Fashion

Here are my other top picks from our analysis on fashion, luxury and beauty:

1. Fashion’s Innovation Dilemma. Nike’s shuttering of RTFKT, the virtual sneaker brand it acquired in 2021, highlights a perennial problem for companies that want to remain innovation leaders: Rush in and potentially make a costly mistake, or hang back and risk being late.

2. Why Fashion Needs the Art World More Than Ever. Art Basel Miami Beach has become a cultural tentpole that attracts America’s wealthiest and an evolving art customer base that may prove key in reversing the luxury downturn.

3. Textile Recycling: Big Opportunity or Risky Business? French engineering giant Technip Energies builds oil refineries and liquefied natural gas platforms. Now, it’s aiming to establish a $2 billion business regenerating polyester.

4. The Rise of the Indigenous Model. The four years since Quannah ChasingHorse was discovered by a Calvin Klein scouting director have seen a wave of Native talent appear on magazine covers and in high-profile shows. But for an industry that’s coasted on lazy depictions of Indigenous culture, old habits die hard.

5. Why Fashion Isn’t Making Climate Progress and What Needs to Change. Big brands are focused on buzzy, marketable ‘solutions’ and face little accountability for failing to deliver on decarbonisation targets, but there are ways to unlock more effective action, writes Kenneth P. Pucker.

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