The news agency – NPR – has published an article and a podcast on Coco Chanel: The Unlikely Fashion Icon. To read the story, click here And here is the podcast below……

Karl Lagerfeld dressed up the Grand Palais as the world’s largest – and probably most expensive – chemical garden for the Chanel show. Clusters of crystals the size of old London phone boxes sprouted from a sparkle-dusted floor.

Chanel is privately owned by the Wertheimer family and reserves the right to ensure any financial figures remain under wraps. But its spectacular revenues are a given. It should come as no great surprise, then, that the clothes, too, were not for shrinking violets.

Models with glossy, slicked-back ponytails and huge glittering eyebrows wore boucle wool parkas with jewel-encrusted hoods, skinny cropped trousers and striped knits, layered one over the other. Here was a grey flannel cap-sleeved ankle-length gilet decorated with what looked like a map of the solar system, there the iconic little black dress, with a bodice finished with hard-edged tiles of mirrored plastic. Some of the accessories were equally striking – even including, in one notable case, a three-year-old child.

If last season, Lagerfeld’s message was one of sweetness, for the autumn a tougher aesthetic came to the fore. Colour was almost invariably dark: bottle green, navy, plum, black and shades of grey; embellishment was loud and proud as opposed to fragile and more than a nod to the Eighties came in the form of Lurex and an oversized silhouette.

Then, of course, there were the money-spinning accessories: heavy metal cuffs, the famous quilted 2.55 bag dangling from gilded chains and necklaces finished with lozenges of semi-precious rock all made an appearance. Later in the day, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, designers of the Valentino label, also hardened up the prettiness of their summer collection in favour of something more austere.

Theirs was a subtle shift, however, and a lovely one for that. Soft black leather was finished with frogging and braiding – a nod to the military mood that has been seen elsewhere – but executed with restraint. Cotton dresses in black and Valentino red and with youthful scalloped edges were similarly refined.

If the idea behind employing new talent to reinvent old names is to draw future generations into the fold, then this show was a brilliant demonstration of that. Suffice it to say that all of those young, beautiful and, of course, rich enough to invest in high-end designer fashion would do well to spend their money here.

This autumn’s must-have accessory

Everyone knows cute kids can make great accessories, and the three-year-old boy who graced the Chanel catwalk yesterday was no exception.

Despite knowing the dangers of working with children and animals, designers often do – they know it’s a surefire way to grab headlines and extra column inches, not to mention lull their audiences into a broody swoon.

For autumn 1999, Alexander McQueen punctuated his autumn snowstorm show with a pair of young, red-headed twins, who only added to the other-worldliness. Last September, the London-based label Meadham Kirchhoff had a troupe of pre-teen ballerinas pirouette along the catwalk before models returned for a finale.

And Jean-Paul Gaultier, always one to take things to extremes, had models walk different breeds of dogs for autumn 2006, as they showed off his priceless pieces.

Fashion designer and Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld has directed a short silent film for the fashion house featuring Alice Dellal to promote the new Chanel Boy handbag collection.

Dubbed “My New Friend Boy,” the short film comes on the heels of the massive success of silent movie “The Artist”. The short film features British model/rocker Alice Dellal dramatically dressed on a quest for a Boy bag with the only sound coming from dramatic piano music.

Chanel released the short film to promote their new Boy handbag collection and Dellal adds a touch of rock & roll to the campaign, with dreadlocks combined with her signature ripped tights and leather outfit.

The new line of Chanel handbags are based on a hunting cartridge style originally carried by Coco Chanel herself. The Chanel Boy bags are made to embody the androgynous charm the designer was known for.

Karl Lagerfeld said, “Chanel used man’s underwear to make dresses; she had this boyish attitude, in fact it is the very spirit of Chanel. She got it from Boy Capel, the great love of her life, which, incidentally, explains why the new bag is called the Boy Chanel.”

Available in a pared-down palette of red, grey and ivory, the glazed calfskin clutches, purses and totes range from $2500 to $4300.

This is a really fun and well done interview! Bravo Karl!

Recently, I’ve seen a lot of talk from social media expert-types and novices alike, arguing that the number of Twitter followers you have or Facebook fans you have doesn’t matter. It’s all about the quality of the followers and how engaged you are with them, they say. While I’d be the 1st person to agree with the importance of building a highly engaged, well-targeted community across social networks, quantity matters too.

Numbers count, a lot.

The main reason that both quality and quantity of followers matters is that quality alone doesn’t scale. No large organization on the planet or employee of a large organization can claim that a highly engaged, high quality,small social network community is anywhere near as valuable as a highly engaged, high quality large social network community. Can you?

Two months ago I launched a challenge to my entire staff: Demonstrate your thought leadership. Grow your follower count on Twitter as much as possible.

Use Twitter’s new ad products Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets and see what you can do. I awarded prizes to the top 5 in number of followers gained. Of the 28 individuals in the competition, everyone gained at least 200 followers. Two people each gained over 4,000 followers. They also gained lots of insight. Here are a few of my staffs’ thoughts about gaining followers, quantity vs quantity, & thought leadership on Twitter:

BM: Don’t be afraid to take risks. Engage with everyone who seeks you out. You never know where the #GameChanger is going to come from!

AK: You are your own brand, so promote yourself creatively. Utilize the resources you have, both on Twitter and off. Think outside the box.

JL: Anyone who provides valuable, relevant content and has an outlet for getting it out there can be a thought leader. You get what you give.

AH: There are a lot of crazy Beiber fans on Twitter!…oh & be yourself, converse, share, RT & people will want to follow you!

DN: Quality of followers that will actually engage with your brand is more important than the number of followers.

We got lots of great feedback on this competition for our staff, clients, and community. But we also got negative feedback from the competition, and from a similar Twitter follower competition we host for interns.  One social media strategist, wrote of the competition, “They’ve demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of social strategy from the CEO down and they’re one of the many vendors and social media “agencies” giving other social media professionals a bad rep.”

Sheesh. Onward…

It seems to me that as important as engagement and quality of followers is, if you’re going to use social media to drive business results, you need a lot of followers as well. Here are four examples of relatively high Twitter follower accounts across different use cases driving real business impact:

1) Dell: @DellOutlet’s over 1 million followers led directly to over $6.5 million in sales.

2) Jet Blue: @JetBlueCheeps has over 230,000 followers and have used the account to generate thousands of flash sales.

3) Ashton Kutcher: He has used his over 6 million followers to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for several causes.

4) Likeable Book: On a much smaller but not inconsequential note, we amassed 1800 followers on Twitter in just 6 weeks, part of the reason we launched a New York Times bestseller.

According to Google, there are over 2.4 million “social media experts” out there. Unfortunately, too many of them are either preaching “it’s all about quality” OR “it’s all about quantity.”  I say the numbers do matter. Both quality AND quantity matter on Twitter and in social media. Want to increase your number of Twitter followers? Look here

That beautiful metaphor seems appropriate for the Chanel couture show, which was dense with subtle and exquisite embellishment and took flight on another kind of wings: those of an airplane, a shell built inside the Grand Palais to serve as the show’s venue.

Getting on board was the usual lengthy airport trek. But once seated, the stylish drinks trolley reminded the fashion travelers that this was no ordinary airplane ride — even if the models were all in blue, like an open sky.

Trim and elegant as fantasy air hostesses, the first models were sent out by Karl Lagerfeld, who appeared in front of a mock cockpit at the end to take his bow.

The chic severity of the short dresses, which were suffused in couture details and quintessentially Chanel, was offset by hairstyles that looked like they had been caught in an engine tailspin. A single curving pad by the cheek made the most glamorous of earplugs.

“It’s my blue period,” joked Mr. Lagerfeld, who explained that his cat’s eyes had set him on this path to the runway.

The blue spread in all directions: downward as sapphire baubles dangled from the ears, while skirts fell to ankle length under elongated jackets. Sleeves blew up at the shoulders, as light and vaporous as clouds, but strips of fabric anchored the stand-away necklines.

Every way the audience’s eyes turned found another couture detail, from the house’s signature camellia, in blue shading from cornflower to violet, to crystal beads glinting on hose under lacy, above-the-knee dresses. The embroidery was so subtle and delicate that it would have taken a magnifying class to examine its complexity.

Mr. Lagerfeld’s blue-sky thinking made an elegant collection, filled with tailored clothes that seemed appropriate to straightened times and with evening looks that were light and pretty. But the unexpectedly faithful attachment to Coco’s legacy was perhaps too close this season, for the collection never broke through to that outer-space fashion realm of the imagination that Mr Lagerfeld can reach.

Rare craftsmanship is the foundation of haute couture at Givenchy , especially since the designer Riccardo Tisci has developed a mode of presenting his collection — 10 intensely worked looks — in three rooms of a Parisian hôtel particulier.

Up close, a supple dress, sinuous and seductive with its reptilian surface, turned out to be made from crocodile, but with each scale painstakingly cut out, washed and then sewn back on semitransparent tulle: a mere 350 hours of workmanship.

“After seven years at Givenchy, I have learned a lot — it is like a journey,” Mr. Tisci said.

The collection was a meticulous work out of imagination with craft.

Its starting point was the graphic images of “Metropolis,” the 1927 Fritz Lang film. Deeper research led Mr. Tisci to the 1924 Russian movie “Aelita: Queen of Mars,” with its soundtrack supposedly an inspiration for 1970s techno music.

The 1920s era inspired various ideas: the era of sparkling, speakeasy glamour, interpreted as a dress with layers of twinkling fringe, slung on a thick chain over a tank top. The linear, constructivist workwear included a pair of black pants worn with a sparkle blouse and a glitter of necklace, earrings and nose rings.

Givenchy couture gets to the essence of rigorous, intensive craft within a streamlined shape and a one-on-one relationship with clients who can make Mr. Tisci’s image their own.

At Armani Privé , the saturation of a single color was again the message. But this time it was all green — a mix of those risqué drinks of chartreuse and absinthe, as well as the algaed depths of a pool where aquatic reptiles bathe.

It gave an eerie effect to a simple-seeming show, where the texture of crocodile, mesh, and faint scale patterns made the neat fitted jackets and slim skirts, awkwardly wrapped at the front, seem relatively simple. There were shiny, slim pants as an alternative.

But the forte of Giorgio Armani in this Privé collection is its relationship to the red carpet.

By luck or judgment, the designer had front row the young auburn-haired actress Jessica Chastain, who received the news of her Oscar nomination for her role in “The Help” just before the show started.

“I am so excited. I am trying not to cry,” Ms. Chastain said as she received a bouquet of white roses from Mr. Armani backstage. His other gift to her — or any other stylish nominee — were dresses where reptilian patterns were wrapped in sensual folds below a slender and simple bustier top.

All the Privé evening offerings hit that delicate spot between poufy dressing up and a modern attitude for an energetic woman of today.

“It’s the ABC of couture,” announced Giambattista Valli before sending out a collection of concoctions that seemed to absorb every kind of cut, couture skill and rich embellishment — yet without weighing down the overall look for his young clients.

The show started and ended with a cape, dense with three-dimensional flowers. But a more typical look was crusty guipure lace, re-embroidered with what the designer called “macramé” flowers. There was nothing to suggest that they had been made by loving hands on a hippie trail, for all the decoration was at the summit of sophistication and the favored black and white combination embraced caviar-sized jet beading or a molded top with a peplum over a slim lace skirt.

Mr. Valli was accepted this season into the official ranks of French haute couture. He celebrated it with a show at the Hôtel de Crillon. A trio of grand ball gowns with bold roses and hydrangea prints were symbolic of a designer who is in full flower.

“It started with a scent,” Alexandre Vauthier said backstage to describe his inspiration from Estée Lauder’s “Youth Dew” fragrance: literally, the drape, shape and gilded lines of the bottle and packaging; but also the new fragrance’s context in 1950s New York, when the Waldorf Astoria was the center of society.

From that, the designer drew a fine collection that opened with an immaculately draped white tunic over slim pants, a gilt metallic torque at the neck.

The show went on to caress the shapely waist of the original Youth Dew bottle. But there was nothing of that era in black dresses that fell loose over the bosom, or in slender outfits in the fragrance’s signature pale turquoise or a pastel lavender.