Ms Liliana Pomazan
Liliana is a lecturer in fashion history, culture and theory and her academic work ranges across various subjects in RMIT's undergraduate and postgraduate programs. She has given public and special lectures at the National Gallery of Victoria and the University of Melbourne. She has also published papers on fashion and fashion teaching and has a passion for Twentieth Century haute couture. Her Masters thesis analysed and discussed the contributions, originality and significance of the well- known Paris couturier Karl Lagerfeld - who, perhaps as a perverse whim, actually read it.
Modernism and Postmodernism in the House of Chanel
After Coco Chanel's death in 1971, her Parisian couture house remained open for business but did not do well. There is little doubt that Karl Lagerfeld consistently developed an unique style influenced by his study of past traditions. Lagerfeld reinterpreted and personalised many of Chanel's elegant and functional designs for clothing and presented them with an incorporated freshness rarely associated with fashion. Lagerfeld's individual collections for the House of Chanel form daring aesthetic extensions of its classic suit designs. Lagerfeld's imaginative garments have a basis in his use of Chanel's original fashion design elements. In his regenerative work for Chanel, Lagerfeld combines the type of fashion made famous by Coco Chanel in a manner which is eclectic and irreverent. It is a personal style which almost parodies her original ideas, yet gives them new forms and directional impulse. This seems to be achieved by Lagerfeld's ability to systematically cross the boundaries of Modernist ideals, once so powerful and authoritative, and to move toward his more Postmodernist preferences. Lagerfeld's Postmodernist designs and ideas are characterised by an air of anti-seriousness and ironic detachment; one might say that Lagerfeld paid tribute to Chanel's design aesthetics and later played tribute to them.
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