show business; The Paris haute couture was all about theatricality and the dramatic statement-revolutionary, romantic, or futuristic.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

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Paris is a city that has embraced drama and innovation in design for centuries, and the Grand Palais, built for the World's Fair of 1900 and gleaming from a UU100 million restoration completed last year, is a shining symbol of that, as startling and modern as any of the great contemporary structures in the capital. This design drama was celebrated and complemented by Chanel, which constructed its own modernist set at the Grand Palais, with a circular stage and a great central tower 100 feet high pointing up into the soaring dome-a trellis of verdigris-colored steel girders and conservatory glass.

Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel's designer, seemed inspired by this architectural futurism, opening the show with abstractions of those classic Chanelisms-the tidy little suit and the little black dress, crafted with scissored precision. "He challenged the ateliers," declared his assistant and muse, Amanda Harlech, "to create a very new silhouette with a very new shoulder." The shoulder in question was molded into curves that mirrored the belling arcs of the skirts, which were cut to mid-thigh and worn with black toe-tipped white boots. Although those boots were inspired by a pair worn by Coco Chanel in a 1956 portrait, the clothes had a subtle resonance of the Courreges youthquake sixties.

"Shape and softness" was Lagerfeld's mantra for the show, and while his daywear was a study in defined line and precision cutting, he softened the look with prom flowers, worn at the wrist and twisted into the hair. For evening, the hardness disappeared altogether under impasto layers of embroidery and feather-_work in liquid 1930s lines. Lagerfeld was inspired by the tour de force exhibit at London's Royal Academy, "China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795." This show revealed that the emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, conquering Manchu warriors from the north, were also highly refined artistic patrons and poets. Lagerfeld took the exquisite pale-jade objects that the emperors commissioned and used them as a starting point for his dazzling evening embroideries; Chanel has recently added the artificial-flower house Guillet to its portfolio of luxury fournisseurs, which already includes Lesage and Lemarie.

As the last girl trailed her diaphanous embroidered train into the central structure, the sound track of the Shangri-Las segued into Poulenc, and the tower shell soared heavenward to reveal the Chanel girls ranged, Busby Berkeley-fashion, down the towering spiral staircase that was hidden beneath it. Once again, Lagerfeld had reinvented Chanel with a showman's razzle-dazzle.

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