Chanel's enchanted forest show angers environmentalists

The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has been criticised by environmentalists after reportedly chopping down several old oak and poplar trees for his Chanel catwalk show.

Campaigners said the grand couturier’s attempt to present Chanel’s green credentials had badly backfired and revealed the fashion house was “completely divorced from the reality of protecting nature”.

Lagerfeld turned the vast glass nave of Paris’s Grand Palais into an autumn forest for the event, strewing dead leaves, moss and logs on a mirrored runway and installed nine tall trees inside.

Guests, including the British actor Keira Knightley, the singer Lily Allen, and the former French first lady Carla Bruni Sarkozy, were installed on rows of wooden benches to watch the models walking down what appeared to be woodland paths.

The France Nature Environment (FNE) federation of ecology groups condemned Chanel for the show, accusing it of “heresy”.

“Chanel has missed the point once again. The celebrated fashion house chose to present a ‘natural’ decor with real trees for its haute couture event. The result: trees, some of them a hundred years old, were chopped down for a few hours of show,” FNE said in 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.

Source: theguardian