It Took Chanel 9 Days and a Team of 150 to Build an Indoor Beach – The New York Times

At Chanel’s most recent spring ready-to-wear collection, held in Paris’s Grand Palais on an overcast morning last October, nearly 3,000 guests were transported to Sylt, a tiny German island in the North Sea, where Karl Lagerfeld, the house’s longtime artistic director, first remembers encountering the ocean as a child. The nave of the late 19th-century, 828,220-square-foot exhibition hall was, save for its vaulted glass ceiling, encased with a cotton backdrop depicting a blue sky flecked with fluffy clouds. Then, one by one, 80 barefoot models — some with sandals dangling from their hands — began to walk down a runway of sand while real-water waves crashed gently on the artificial shore.

For Chanel — a house particularly adept at world creation that has, over the past nine years, conjured in the same space a supermarket complete with tins of tuna and plastic shopping carts, an airport terminal (with a staffed ticketing counter and branded roller bags) and an origami-filled garden — the show was another paradisiacal exhibition, one teetering on the edge of surreal. In this case, the thrill, apart from the clothes themselves (boxy pastel-colored tweeds, printed silk day dresses paired with straw hats), lay in the tension in seeing glossy luxury juxtaposed against nature’s raw elements. “I pick it up in the air,” Lagerfeld explained of the concept over email. “There is no rule.”