Coco's Legacy

edited by Sheila Kim-Jamet -- Interior Design, 4/1/2005 12:00:00 AM

Once, it was scandalous for women to even think about men's underwear. Then during World War I, when conventional dressmaking fabric grew scarce, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel famously picked up the jersey undergarment staple and began making some of history's most iconic dresses.

"Chanel," an exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, lauds that moment and the legendary fashion house that grew from it. "Gabrielle Chanel was an outsider who understood the rules and threw them back in the face of the establishment," says Harold Koda, the museum's curator in charge of The Costume Institute. The namesake show spanning the Coco era through the reign of Karl Lagerfeld, the label's current artistic director, pulls together clothes and accessories from the museum's collection as well as the Chanel archives. May 5–August 7; 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.