CHANEL SPRING/SUMMER 1993 (01946 94305) BLACK LUCITE WHITE ‘CHANEL PARIS’ SPELLOUT LOGO SUNGLASSES

Black lucite sunglasses from Chanel’s Spring/Summer 1993 ready-to-wear runway show under the artistic direction of Karl Lagerfeld.

“Lagerfeld’s main conceit for the season was to pair the house’s tweed jackets with logoed men’s briefs à la Calvin Klein.”, noted Vogue in January 1992. “Unlike the Marky Mark and Kate Moss ads of the same year, at Chanel the effect wasn’t sizzle but camp. Men’s briefs, Lagerfeld told the New York Times, are “the last thing women haven’t taken from the men.” Ultimately, though, the real news here was in the hyper-femininity of the opening look’s back-zipped corset and the generous 18th-century-style décolletage it created. This was the erogenous zone that would interest Lagerfeld for the next few seasons. Another way that the designer played with the innerwear-as-outerwear trend was to pair bras, rather than shirts or tees or tanks, with tweedy jackets. There was also a series of floaty romantic embroidered dresses in the softest of pastels. The collection’s voulez-vous couchez avec moi came at the finale, when Lagerfeld sent out a parade of cool, virginal white summer dresses that seemed to have been assembled using the contents of a linen closet and featured embroideries and openwork typically used for bedclothes. Vogue photographed Karen Mulder looking like a million bucks in the designer’s artfully styled aforementioned tweed corset and cropped jacket, matching tweed handbag and white flared trousers worn in combination with a number of the mixed-metal colored accessories that appeared with headline-making profusion on the runway.

Made in France.