Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel

Coco Chanel appears twice on this site, in the 1930s and in the 1950s comeback. This entry isn't about her. It's about what happened to her house after she died in 1971 - and about the designer who, in the 1980s, created the model for the modern revival of an old fashion house.

By the early 1980s, Chanel was respected but dull. The suits were still made beautifully, but they were worn by older, conservative clients, and the house mainly made money from perfume. In 1983 it hired Karl Lagerfeld to design its couture, and soon its ready-to-wear too. He was an experienced German-born designer who had won a prestigious design competition in 1954, worked at Balmain and Patou, and spent years as a freelancer, most notably at Chloé and Fendi. Houses had carried on after their founders before - Dior did, after 1957 - but reinventing a dead founder's house, rather than just keeping it going, was still unusual at the time.

Lagerfeld's approach was to take Chanel's signature details and turn up the volume. The interlocking double-C logo, which had been fairly discreet, went everywhere - on buttons, belts, earrings, and bags. The gold chains got bigger and heavier, the quilting stronger, the pearls more numerous. He made the classic tweed suit shorter, sharper, and more fitted, with 1980s shoulders, and mixed it with leather, denim, and even sportswear. He treated the Chanel "codes" as a language he could play with rather than rules to preserve, and he hired the model Inès de la Fressange as the face of the house, making it look young again.

It worked brilliantly, and it tells us a lot about the decade. The 1980s loved visible wealth - think of power dressing or the glamour of Dynasty - and a Chanel jacket with gold buttons or a quilted bag on a chain became the ultimate status symbol, instantly recognisable across a room. That made the house hugely profitable, and it also drew criticism: that Lagerfeld had turned a designer who hated fuss into a brand of logos and excess. I have mixed feelings myself, but his influence is undeniable. Almost every revival of an old fashion house since - Tom Ford's Gucci in the 1990s among them - has followed his model, and he stayed at Chanel until his death in 2019.