Karl Lagerfeld: Chanel's Russian Connection (+CD)

Peripatetic Chanel head designer, book publisher, photographer--and now, film director--Karl Lagerfeld founded Metiers d'Arts in 2002 to showcase the talents of Chanel's seven specialist ateliers (that provide the couture house with costume jewelry, embroidery and millinery). This volume focuses on Chanel's 2008-2009 Metiers d'Arts collection Paris-Moscow. If Paris-Moscow indulges Lagerfeld's fascination for Russia through fashion, then Russian Connection is that fascination embodied in book form. Lagerfeld's images evoke Imperial Russia, Constructivism, Catherine the Great, Faberge, Russian folklore and Coco Chanel's own passion for Russia, via the great Ballets Russes, Byzantine jewelry and her affair with the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Included here is a DVD featuring Lagerfeld's directorial debut, Coco 1913/Chanel 1923, a silent black-and-white film depicting Chanel's flirtation with Russian-Parisian emigre society in the 1910s and 1920s.