Chanel Couture Serves Up A Bad Nineties Flashback

Karl Lagerfeld‘s Chanel couture show was a mish-mash of conflicting styles — but rather than being surprising and awesome, like a peanut-butter-banana sandwich, it was mostly ugly and retch-inducing, like a red wine milkshake. Here is the full Nanny-grunge-Thirties-matador horror.

Aside from the fact that this dress looks like a giant deformed bow…it also looks difficult to walk in.

Lagerfeld said after the show, “I had zose sumo-wrestling suits at my last birthday party, und zey vere a hit. Kate and Baptiste fought for hours und hours, und Diane, she said ze funniest tzing to me in German — oh, it vas the greatest. So I vas a little inzpired.”

In other news, Fran Drescher totally wore this suit in 1992. Only she bought it at Loehmann’s for $40.

And I’m pretty sure that season when she got pregnant with Maxwell’s twins, she wore this.

One good way to keep your mink cuffs from dangling over your dinner plate and messing up your caviar-and-truffle mini-toasts is by trimming them back to a nice, skimpy three-quarter length.

Then Lagerfeld explained, “My other inzpiration for fall vas ze asexual gallerina of ze early nineties. Ethnic embroideries, shapeless skirt, ruched boots, jewelry zat could hurt a man — it all starts zere.”

And, Karl, can we talk about that hair? Even as the collection roamed through the 20th Century, picking out silhouettes and fabrics seemingly at random, the hair remained firmly in the front row of a Pearl Jam concert in 1993.

There were some more successful looks, like this 1930s-inspired lace dress. But one rather suspects they only shone so brightly because they could be favorably compared with the sloppy rest. Where did Chanel go so wrong?