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Chakra goes Hollywood

There’s no missing the Georges Chakra woman. In body-hugging goddess gowns in metallic fabrics bedazzled with sequins and rhinestones, the Lebanese designer’s girl could inadvertently blind you from a mile away.
France Fashion
Models wear creations by German fashion designer Karl Otto Lagerfeld for French fashion house Chanel as part of his Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2010-2011 collection presented Tuesday

PARIS — There’s no missing the Georges Chakra woman. In body-hugging goddess gowns in metallic fabrics bedazzled with sequins and rhinestones, the Lebanese designer’s girl could inadvertently blind you from a mile away.

Chakra looked to old-school Hollywood glamour for a fall-winter 2011 haute couture collection Monday of high-shine looks that were all but begging for the red carpet.

He served up nip-waisted cocktail dresses with strands of white sequins that swayed and jangled as the models walked and bustier gowns in bronze lame with mermaid tails and oversided plum-coloured bows — gowns, in short, that almost uncannily resembled the Oscar statuettes they were meant for receiving.

“It’s like watching those old black-and-white movies from old-time Hollywood, but this time it’s in colour,” Chakra told The Associated Press.

And what colour. The asymmetrical cocktail dresses shone darkly in iridescent emerald, prune and maroon, and jewel tone silks shone beneath swishy panels on some of the lame dresses.

Refrains from the Mad Men soundtrack and the Radiohead song No Surprises played over and over, and both were a kind of shorthand for a collection. Steeped in the kind of classy glamour that has become Chakra’s calling card, the lovely collection stayed in familiar territory, presenting, as it were, no surprises at all.