When Lagerfeld presented Chanel's Cruise collection in Dubai, where brushed steel towers poke at the sky in shapes that are plucked from the dreams of feverish futurologists. It's been a decade or so since the designer was last here and he scarcely recognized the place. You can only imagine how much that excited a man who regards yesterday as complete anathema. "The next step, the new reality," he declaimed enthusiastically of Dubai. "This is something totally unexpected. You couldn't imagine it fifty years ago. "So it was slightly odd that the clothes Lagerfeld showed left the impression of something you might actually imagine a hundred years ago, when Paul Poiret's injection of Eastern exoticism freed fashionable Parisians from the restrictions of the 19th century. "Better to do that than the sixties, the seventies, what everyone else does," said Lagerfeld, with nary a hint of defensiveness. "This is my idea of a romantic, modern Orient, a new One Thousand and One Nights."  And there was no place more appropriate to offer it up than Dubai, where West and East, today and tomorrow, real and fake meet in a duty-free, shopaholic embrace. (…) Ambiguity offers Lagerfeld the nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems effect that he craves. Here, it was evident in the fabric treatments that defied immediate comprehension: clusters of beading, three-dimensional geometries, decaying tweeds and patchworks.

by TIM BLANKS - Vogue.com