While it may have been the highest-brow ugly sweater party of all time, Karl Lagerfeld’s Métiers d’Art (pre-fall 2013) collection for Chanel – shown yesterday at Linlithgow Palace, just outside of Edinburgh – did have its saving sunburst moments, like rays through an overcast Glaswegian winter morning.

Highland haute formed his Royal bloodline – from fur-trimmed moccasin boots to piles of slouch-knitted house bouclés, Fair Isles, tweeds, and cashmeres. He also explored a vaguely Indo-Anglo terrain – gorgeously, in one case, with a kaleidoscopic pheasant-feather breastplate over shredded tulle shoulders and sheered bell-sleeves.

It’s probably very easy to become sartorially defeatist in the dead of a Scottish cold snap, but Lagerfeld skated around the doldrums by imbuing both vivre and richness in his lineup – swinging his legs just over the castle’s edge, toeing the moated waters of costume territory. It’s a skill he’s mastered; Chanel’s runways are outrageously over the top, but when deconstructed, the clothes themselves are damned-if-they-aren’t wearable.

Lagerfeld pumped no breaks regarding his showmanship, exhibiting once again that surplus is to be expected. For fashion writers, this means there was a lot to sift through – and while everything at Chanel is always beautifully made, the excess ostensibly lends credence to the casualness (or crudeness) of the term “rag trade.” But upon inspection, one couldn’t help but to notice Cara Delevingne’s loose-collared sweater, ringed in salmon yarn with a body of trellis-cabled ivory knit, or local Stella Tennant’s opening-look crystal embellishments on a nicely blocked tartan and navy overcoat. Romance was the key here (Karl even said so himself), but it didn’t feel steeped in anything archival – save for the show’s setting, the site of the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots. Rather, the romance inherent sprung from that warm-and-fuzzy feeling of coziness – coming in from the hunt, tossing off your Wellies, and petting your hound by the fire – all the while swaddled in Chanel with a glass of red wine and a cigarette. Thus, from the red carpet to the estate, from Lake Como to Loch Ness, Lagerfeld has proven once again that there’s basically nowhere or nothing that can escape his limitless imagination. 

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