Caveat: The space was simply too vast to communicate the errant charm of a real brasserie, even those as big as La Coupole, Balzar, and Bofinger, all places that Lagerfeld used to frequent when brasseries were crucibles of culture.
The Grand Palais, the grandest exhibition space in le tout Paris, was turned into the kind of all-day, leather-banquette-ed winer-and-diner you can find on almost any street corner in Paris. So you could almost construe Lagerfeld's last three ready-to-wear collections for Chanel as an uncynical celebration of French banality: the supermarché, the manifestation (does a single day pass without a demonstration?), and now, the brasserie. It wasn't exactly a love letter-Karl Lagerfeld is much too savvy for sentiment-but the Chanel collection he showed today was, he conceded, 'a vision of France from a stranger who thinks France is not that bad.' He's grown increasingly tired of the drip-drip-drip of cynical negativity, much of it from the French themselves.
