WE JUST MET: Chanel, the subject of a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005, is returning to the landmark New York museum in December to parade its next Métiers d’Art collection. The show will be held Dec. 4.
Chanel has a long association with New York, a city that Coco Chanel first visited in 1931, according to the fashion house. U.S. department stores were among her strongest early supporters, having carried her first hat collections from 1912. “Karl Lagerfeld is also very attached to the American mega-city whose energy and light he has always loved to capture,” Chanel said.
The December show, further details of which have yet to be revealed, will mark the third time Chanel has shown in Manhattan after the presentation at the brand’s boutique on 57th Street in 2005 for the Métiers d’Art collection and its 2006 cruise show in Grand Central Terminal.
The luxurious Métiers d’Art collection, conceived by Lagerfeld as a way to exalt the specialty couture ateliers Chanel owns, typically travels to a destination — Edinburgh, Salzburg, Dallas, Rome — and recounts a chapter of the house lore, real or imagined.
In 2017, Lagerfeld took the itinerant pre-fall show to his hometown of Hamburg in Germany, attracted by the Elbphilharmonie, a spectacular concert hall designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron that overlooks the port.
Introduced by Lagerfeld in 2002, the Métiers d’Art show ignited the pre-collection frenzy and has become one of the brand’s most important deliveries.