I’m not really an embellishment kind of woman. My wardrobe tends toward the minimalist which is the reason I so love some of the new shops like COS and designers like Armani. A Little French Jacket, however, requires embellishment.
As I look back through my inspirational Pinterest board where I’ve been amassing photos of Chanel jackets through the years, it is clear that (a) a jacket that pays homage to Chanel will have trim; and (b) when Chanel was doing the designing, the embellishment was more subdued than in recent years under the design leadership of Karl Lagerfeld. I’m sticking with Coco.
Someday I’d love to use the fringed selvage of my tweed fabric to trim a Chanel-type jacket, but my current project’s fabric really didn’t lend itself to this. In fact, when I cut off the selvages in the hope it might work, I put them up against the loopy fabric, where they completely disappeared. You couldn’t see the trim at all! That would have been a waste. Here’s hoping I can use them on a future project. The fabric is such a true bouclé that when the edges are turned back on themselves, there are loops that mask the fringy-ness (is that a word?) of the trim. So, I put them aside to trim something else in the future and shopped for the trim.
[Pictured above: Authentic Chanel trims. I don’t like the silhouette of the jacket on the bottom right, but the trim is interesting!]
When I talked about my inspirations in an earlier post about this project, one of them was trims themselves. I found one layer of my trim in the shop where I usually buy my fabrics in the garment district in Toronto. I found the other at a hat-making shop nearby. Together they have a subtleness, with a bit of a kick this time since I hope to be able to dress this jacket up. So, in spite of my tendency for all things plain (and I really did like this jacket when it was all put together and without its trim!), the upper part of the trim is silver. Yes, silver! But I love it and think it will look great on New Year’s Eve and later with jeans.
Anyway, when I was searching for trim, I followed the instructions of everyone who has done this more times than I have and held the piece of trim upright as it will appear on the jacket to see how it would look. Well, that has its limitations. When I started attaching the trim, it was clear that my preview had been limited to say the least. That being said, I still like it. Just know that holding up the trim to a swatch is not the same as seeing metres and metres of it pinned to your jacket. At least that’s the way it is for me.
Trimming my first LFJ was a bit fraught! I had high hopes of using two layers of gimp braid to reproduce a Chanel-like look. What a disaster! It was the first time I had ever worked with gimp which, when cut, unravelled mercilessly. This I had not been aware of when I began to cut it. My dear husband helped me to find a gluing solution to this problem, but that only highlighted the second one – that trimming to plan (neckline, front opining edges, sleeves and pockets) was a good idea at the time, but when I put my trim on the actual jacket, there was way too much of it. I ended up spending a lot of time unpicking and removing trim.
[The first photo above is of the layered trims on my first jacket. They made the edges of the jacket so stiff, I had to remove the extra layer of gimp. The finished edges on the right are more like the Chanel jacket in the first photo in this post.]
This time would be different – so it is, yet I have a new problem.
I hand-stitched the first layer of very tiny, fine black ruffle to the all edges with tiny slip stitches of silk thread. Then I stitched the four metres of silver/black braid over top with similar, tiny hand stitches.
Then I stood back and looked at it. To my horror, the bouclé fabric is so loopy that you can see the loops created by the folded fabric. In my view it looks hideous. So I had to find a solution to the loopiness without resorting to shaving them off (a solution offered by my husband and quickly discarded by me).
I decided to use a grey silk thread and try to invisibly adhere it to the inside so that it will lay flat. Well, that does seem to be working out – that’s where I am now. Then I’ll steam the neckline into position and then it’s time for the final step – adding the gold chain to the inside of the hem. Very exciting to be nearly finished!
Coco Chanel knew a thing or two about elegance. Most of us have an innate sense of what it means to be elegant (whether or not we aspire to it – I do), but if pressed to define the term—well, that’s a bit more elusive. Since one of my objectives in paying homage to Chanel’s aesthetic by reproducing a few pieces inspired by her approach to design is to create elegantly wearable pieces, I thought it might be informative to look it up.
The G. G. Files 
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