CHANEL · Black and Gold Tweed Cardigan Jacket with Egyptian Buttons

— Paris / New York · The Egyptian Collection · Métiers d’Art 2019 · Karl Lagerfeld

Amulets, on a cardigan

On 4 December 2018 Chanel ran a show through the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, around the Temple of Dendur — raised on the Nile under Augustus, taken apart stone by stone when the Aswan High Dam came for it, given to the United States in thanks, rebuilt in New York behind a wall of glass. Guests reached it over a moat of papyrus planted for the evening.
The collection did not look at the temple. It looked at the cases in the galleries around it: hammered gold, cartouches, the beetle, the eye. This cardigan takes the smallest of those things and puts them exactly where buttons go.

MATERIAL POETRY

• Black tweed shot through with gold and silver — not the flat pharaonic gold the runway used, but the gold of a dark room with something in it
• The glitter is woven into the cloth, not laid on top: it moves when the sleeve moves and has nothing to shed
• A pale gold border frames the V, both front edges, the cuffs, the hem and each pocket flap — gilding run along an edge, the way Egypt gilded dark wood
• Long and soft in the hand: a cardigan’s weight carried on a jacket’s line

HOUSE CODES

• Buttons struck in gold and white gold with the Eye of Horus and the pyramid. In Egypt the eye was an amulet — worn by the living, laid on the dead. Here it fastens a cardigan.
• Four down the front, one on each pocket flap: six amulets, all of them working
• The V cut clean and collarless, the line Mademoiselle drew when she took the jacket off the men’s rail
• Two flap pockets at the hip, bordered in the same pale gold so the eye reads them as part of the frame
• ⟨The inner architecture — the lining⟩

SILHOUETTE

• Cardigan cut, long, falling well past the hip
• V-neck, no collar, no closure above the first button
• Long sleeves, cuffs bordered
• Front edges curving away toward the hem

A cardigan is the most domestic thing in a wardrobe.
This one fastens with amulets.

COLLECTION READING

• The Egyptian Collection is Egypt read at the distance of a museum case — nothing excavated, everything looked at through glass

• In a show of graffitied hieroglyphs, scarab cuffs and gold boots, the cardigan is the quiet piece, and the only one wearing protection

• This was the last Métiers d’Art collection Karl Lagerfeld presented. He took his bow with his godson Hudson Kroenig and died eleven weeks later.

• He spent that evening in a room built for the afterlife and sent out a sweater with an eye on it

  THIS OBJECT

  • Size mark 36 FR

  • ⟨Pristine — kept unworn since the show, 4 December 2018⟩

  • ⟨The metallic thread lies flat throughout: no snagging, no pulled loops⟩

  • ⟨The pale gold border clean along both front edges and at the cuffs — no greying, no soiling⟩

  • ⟨All six buttons present, bright, unscratched, no dulling to the plating⟩

  • ⟨No pilling at the underarm or along the hip⟩

  • ⟨Front edges hang true, with no dropping or stretch⟩

  • ⟨Never altered: original hem and seams⟩