CHANEL'S LOST YEARS: AFTER COCO, BEFORE KARL

The couture house has strategically erased the designers of a vital interim period.

Chanel keeping watch in her favored perch atop the mirrored staircase of her maison.

Twelve years. That’s all that separates Coco Chanel’s rule as the head of her own house and Karl Lagerfeld’s industry-defining run as her eventual successor. If you were to accept the prevailing narrative pushed by Chanel’s corporate arm, you couldn’t be blamed for believing that between Chanel’s death in early 1971 and Karl Lagerfeld’s ascension in 1983 the famous couture house was in hibernation, doing little more than producing a trickle of Chanel No. 5 and waiting for a savior to take it into the stratosphere. That is far from the truth. The reality is a lot more complicated and more interesting.