fashion exhibit

This weekend in Paris, Chloe celebrated its 60th birthday with the opening of a retrospective exhibit called Chloé.ATTITUDES at the Palais de Tokyo. Having only a sense of what Chloe looks like under the creative direction of '70s-leaning minimalist cool girls--from Stella McCartney to to Phoebe Philo to Hannah MacGibbon to Clare Waight Keller--I was surprised to see how whimsical and how much of a sense of humor the label had under earlier designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Maxime de La Falaise. A white v-neck bathing suit with a pineapple on the crotch? Why not?

When Karl Lagerfeld and Carine Roitfeld are behind an event, everyone in fashion shows up looking as effortlessly chic as possible. And that's exactly what happened at last night's New York opening of "The Little Black Jacket: Chanel's classic revisited by Karl Lagerfeld and Carine Roitfeld." Neither rain nor the treacherous cobblestones outside of 18 Wooster Street, where the exhibit is located, could stop celebs like Mad Men's Jessica Paré (who seems to be fashion's favorite new celeb), Lily Collins and Pharrell Williams; too many models to count (but including Joan Smalls, Crystal Renn, and Dree Hemingway); and of course, Karl Lagerfeld and Carine Roitfeld from turning out. The exhibit, which already touched down in Tokyo, features photos from the book of the same name, in which Carine Roitfeld styled and Karl Lagerfeld photographed models, muses and celebrities wearing Chanel's iconic little black jacket. For the New York exhibit, the photos (113 of them) are displayed in black and white covering one enormous wall, and blown up in color on the opposite one. So basically everywhere you turn, there's a compelling, gorgeous photograph of some beautiful famous person wearing a Chanel jacket in way you never expected. It's impossible not to play pick your favorite (Uma Thurman, Anna Wintour, and Sofia Coppola were among mine).