252 pieces of the late designer Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel couture will be up for auction in Paris on Monday, representing the pinnacle of fashion history.
All of them are purportedly from the world’s largest couture collection—more than 2,700 pieces—belonging to French socialite and real estate entrepreneur Mouna Ayoub, a Lebanese-born French socialite.
Items up for auction include a silk crepe dress with chains from the following year that is exactly like the one worn by Penélope Cruz in the Pedro Almodóvar film Broken Embraces, and a “ribbon” dress with sequins from the spring/summer 1991 collection that took 150 hours to make plus another 250 hours to embroider.
The item Ayoub most remembers wearing is an evening coat that was embroidered over 800 hours to resemble Coromandel lacquered screens. She said, “I wore it at an event where Karl [Lagerfeld] was present.” She wore it open “with a turtleneck and slacks.” Karl was really surprised to see me and enquired as to how I had done it. I told him that I was unable to lose the weight I had gained. After that, he laughed and told me to “join the club.” The estimated price range for it is €150,000 to €200,000.
Ayoub, a connoisseur of couture craftsmanship, supposedly kept her clothes in a glass-walled wardrobe in her Riyadh office so she could admire then while at work.
From the early 1990s until 2014, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, and Christy Turlington were some of the original supermodels who modeled the Chanel designs.
Probably the majority of the pieces have never been worn. Formerly wed to Saudi business magnate Nasser Rashid, Ayoub, now 66, said in an interview with Vogue that she was forbidden from wearing short dresses or dresses without sleeves and other such items, even though they were still brand-new and should be enjoyed and worn by someone else.
These items supposedly no longer fit Ayoub, and she is selling them to clear space for new purchases. Additionally, she intends to donate a portion of the earnings to Fondation des Femmes, a French nonprofit that supports women impacted by violence and abuse.
Kerry Taylor, a British fashion auctioneer, and Maurice Auction in Paris are in charge of organizing the sale.