Chanel’s garden

Despite living in the middle of Paris, I usually take little interest in the couture shows, or in fashion more generally. (My post on New York Fashion Week only talked about the trees that had been destroyed to make way for the tents.) But when I read that Chanel this week had created a garden for its catwalk show inside the Beaux-Arts splendour of the Grand Palais, I tracked down a picture.

Photo by Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images

I have nothing clever to say about it. Some papers report that it was based on the garden in the black and white French film “Last Year at Marienbad” (although the models lack the distinctive dark shadows of the film). Others have lazily described it as inspired by Versailles. For me, it’s just nice to see an abstraction of a classical garden making the news.