Chanel Resort 2010

Style.com reports that the new Chanel Resort collection was shown last week in Venice. Three hundred guests sat in wooden deck chairs on the Lido as waves lapped the shore. Karl Lagerfeld's collection was inspired by Venice in the earlier part of the last century. Style.com says that beginning in 1919, Coco Chanel visited Venice for almost ten years and there met Diaghilev, the creator of the brilliant Ballet Russe dance company. The clothes in the collection are a poetic rendering of the period but are modern too. I love clothes that don't really have a specific era -- that go back in time and can be worn in any period, and that's what Lagerfeld accomplished beautifully here. Navy blue and white has always been a favorite; once I had a great navy blue striped long-sleeved French sailor's shirt with a boat neck that I bought on Nantucket. I don't see them any more; back in the day you could get them at L.L. Bean and Army/Navy stores.
The Chanel collection started with a group portraying the mother and children in Death in Venice by novelist Thomas Mann, and then went on to a procession of timeless outfits creating a romantic Venetian dream that evokes Henry James and John Singer Sargent.