Karl Largerfeld’s Chanel shorts are the dreamy escapism you need this week

Karl Lagerfeld is best known for being a designer, lending his elegant touch to brands including Patou, Chloé, Fendi, as well as his eponymous brand, and of course, Chanel. Still, over the course of more than three decades at the French couture house, Lagerfeld also tried his hand at photography and short films. While the German designer’s films never received the critical acclaim of, say, Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) or Rodarte’s Woodshock (2017), the Chanel shorts mix models with award winning actors in over-the-top storylines.

In one of her first acting roles, multi-hyphenate and Lagerfeld muse Cara Delevigne starred in the Lagerfeld film Reincarnation in 2014,  playing a portrait of Empress Sissi of Austria come-to-life. Starting opposite Pharell Williams, who plays a painted version of Sissi’s husband Emperor Franz Joseph, Delevigne and Williams waltz around the lobby of a traditional Salzburg hotel at night while the staff and guests are sleeping, singing the duet “CC The World.” In the story, Coco Chanel, played by Geraldine Chaplin, visits the Austrian inn and takes inspiration from the bellboy uniforms for her signature tweed blazers. The film featured the German-inspired wardrobe of Lagerfeld’s Paris-Salzburg 14/15 Métiers d’art collection.

The life of Chanel founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel often served as source material for the brand’s long-time creative director. In Once Upon a Time (2013), Kiera Knightly—another muse of Lagerfeld’s—plays a young Chanel, opening her first millinery shop in Deauville. Meanwhile, in The Return (2013) Geraldine Chaplin plays an older Chanel, who makes a return to design in 1954 by  reopening her fashion house to challenge the male-designed silhouettes of Christian Dior and Christóbal Balenciaga. Elsewhere, Once and Forever (2015) combines both young and older Chanel stories, taking viewers behind the scenes of a fictional biopic where Kristen Stewart and Geraldine Chaplin are cast to play the French designer in two different points of her life. Stewart steals the show throwing a tantrum about the fictional film being too commercial and not capturing the true essence of Chanel.

Still, some of the more entertaining Lagerfeld shorts are those where he makes use of unstudied actresses, choosing models and creative directors to act out melodramatic and fantastical scenarios. Maybe the best example of this is Lagerfeld’s first Chanel short Tale of a Fairy (2011), which features his 2011/12 Cruise collection for the brand. The story begins with a fight between two heiresses over who the Italian villa they both inherited actually belongs to. Runway veteran, Kristen McMenamy plays the uptight American, not a hair out of place and dripping in Chanel pearls, while creative director Amanda Harlech, a reoccurring actress in Lagerfeld films, plays the bohemian British heiress, who arrives in a free-spirited white blouse with wooden necklaces that look as though they have been collected on her many travels.

McMenamy throws a formal party and is dismayed when the guests show up in leather jackets and play rock’n’roll music, untila fairy, played by Danish model Freja Beha Erichsen, snaps her fingers and transforms the soiree into an elegant Riviera party, straight out of a ‘60s film. Although McMenamy is thrilled by the change, a third heiress,, played by French actress Anna Mouglais, is left disenchanted. Once again, the fairy comes to the rescue and has a love affair with Mouglais. 

In many ways, Lagerfeld was a champion of the ‘fashion film’. His shorts, while entertaining, focus on the storytelling side of the art form as well as the visual, indulging in the fantasy of what ensues in the lives of couture-clad women. Although the acting may not be of Oscar-winning quality, that’s not the point. Instead, they  relish in spectacular garments, dreamy scenery and flesh out the idea of who the Chanel woman may be.