The Latest Chanel Show Pissed Off Environmentalists
The brie and baguette taste a little sour in Paris today because Karl Lagerfeld has turned the City of Lights into the City of Tree Stumps. A few environmentalists noticed Kunty Karl’s forest menagerie looked a little too real and are now protesting in full force because he downed a French forest all in the name of fashion. Tres tree chic!
It’s hard to swing a Choupette and not hit at least one person who has been personally victimized by Karl. He’s called Meryl Streep cheap (and lived to tell the tale!), assaulted the sanctity of quinceañera dresses, and said ugly people make him up his Zoloft prescription. I guess he ran out of people to pick on, so he’s turned to the trees. The Guardian says Chanel’s recent show at Paris Fashion Week was reminiscent of a forest in autumn. They took the theme to heart and replaced chairs with wooden benches for the likes of Lily Allen, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, and Keira Knightley to plop down and watch models trot dough a leaf-covered catwalk (seen above). Alas, it also meant hacking down poplar and oak trees from a forest in western France, and that has some environmental groups’ leaves in a bunch. The France Nature Environment federation of ecology groups issued a statement:
“Promoting the diversity of French forests? An invitation to return to nature? A willingness to show itself to be an eco-responsible label? Whatever Chanel’s motivations, they failed. Nature isn’t about trees cut down in a forest, transported by lorry for scenery they sent to the rubbish skip. It would have been better, indeed innovatory, to set up the catwalk in the forest itself, rather than cut down trees to bring [them] to Paris.”
The environmentalists say the trees were over 100 years old, but Chanel denies that and claims that part of the deal was they got to yell, “Le teeeeemberrrrrrrrrr” (that’s French for “timber,” duh) so long as they planted 100 new trees in the same forest. Naturally, fashion editors didn’t give a flying fook and focused on the art. Harper’s Bazaar described it as “the runway may be the best yet” for Karl. France Nature Environment showed they aren’t total sticks in the mud and just as petty as the rest of us by calling it the “disenchanted forest.”
Chanel’s argument that it is actually a couture house of tree-huggers seemed to fall flat like the trees they chopped down. If I was in charge of their PR team, I would have just issued a flat-out denial: “None of the trees used in today’s fashion show were chopped down. Karl and Choupette just happened to be walking through a forest in western France, and the trees collapsed in their sexy presence. It would have been poor form if we DIDN’T scoop them up and use them!”
Pics: Wenn.com