If you had to align the narrative of Karl Lagerfeld’s shot film for Chanel, ‘Reincarnation’ with a Beyoncé lyric – the unfaltering prism through which we evaluate any and all contributions to the cultural canon – I’d wager that you’d choose ‘Of course sometimes shit go down when it’s a billion dollars on an elevator.‘
Directed by Lagerfeld to accompany the house’s Paris-Salzburg 2014/15 Métiers d’art collection, which will walk tomorrow, Reincarnation’s star turn comes in the form of the hilarious over-emoting of Cara Delevingne and Pharrell Williams, who play both lowly hotel employees and the Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, respectively. Delevingne moonlights as a tricksy barmaid and the subject of the most unflattering portrait you’ve ever seen of her; Pharrell too plays a Zero-like elevator operator whose utilitarian jacket would eventually inspire Gabrielle Chanel’s iconic billion dollar bouclé jacket empire. Together, they sing a Pharrell written song in occasion of the campaign. It sure is something.
Jamie Bochert, Geraldine Chaplin and that ridiculous six year old Koenig child also star. It’s all too much, and yet somehow never enough.
