The night of June 20th, 2019 will be remembered in the annals as the last time when the face of Karl Lagerfeld appeared under the steel and glass domes of the Grand Palais in Paris.
The same place that Kaiser Karl had chosen as the location of the Chanel collections because of its transformist spirit, that space that was an aerospace base, a French port with a docked ship, a flourishing rose garden.
It has the same soul of the German designer, an eclectic mind who embodied the versatility and the continuous evolution of fashion, ranging between fabrics, textures, colors and shapes.
Karl For Ever is the tribute that the maisons Chanel, Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld payed to the creative director who has guided them in recent years: a series of live performances and memoires, directed by director Robert Carsen, in front of an audience of 2,500 guests, including Valentino Garavani, Stella McCartney and Anna Wintour.
Chopin‘s piano music, violinists and tangueros, alternate with the words of Virginia Woolf, Colette, Stéphane Mallarmé read by Tilda Swinton, Fanny Ardant and Cara Delevingne. The big show, however, remains that word with great power: For Ever.
Yes, because Karl Lagerfeld, like all true artists, is beyond time and space, and has had the ability to create clothes that women will want to wear in a hundred and a thousand years.
The urban and glam-rock soul of the Boy bag, the mix of tweed shorts in pastel colors with transparent PVC boots, the total-black, logomania, will never fade.
All this, like Karl Lagerfeld, is forever.