At 3pm on January 25, 1983, a handful of guests were invited to 31 Rue Cambon, where Coco Chanel used to stage her shows until her death in 1971, to witness a historic moment. Already a leading figure in ready-to-wear at the peak of his creative powers, Karl Lagerfeld was to show his first haute couture collection for what was regarded at the time as a house with a fading legacy. He chose to restyle Chanel’s 1939 collection, reinventing some of her classic tropes like the braid-edged tweed two-piece, the ropes of pearls, and the little black dresses: a look that the old guard had always loved but which from that time onwards 25-year-olds would be clamouring to wear.

This started the reinvention of Chanel for the modern woman. The timing was perfect, coinciding with the rise of the female executive and power dressing. Chanel became the go-to brand for brightly coloured tweed dresses and gilt-button jackets layered with chains and pearls, modelled in the mid-80s by supermodels Ines de la Fressange and Jerry Hall. The tweeds, the double CC logo, the quilt bags slung on gold chains all became icons of the era. However, it was images of de la Fressange casually wearing her Chanel jacket with jeans that transformed the fortunes of the house. It was this sense of irreverence that Lagerfeld and de la Fressange promulgated that made the brand so appealing.

Lagerfeld never lost sight of design tropes of Coco Chanel be they the two-tone shoes, the tweeds and jersey, the cardigan suit, the gilt logo buttons, costume jewellery and the little black dress, but he would continuously reinvent them. A lesson nearly every heritage fashion house has repeated since.

In 1991, Lagerfeld sent Linda Evangelista down the catwalk in surfer pants and skintight sequin jacket carrying a surfboard in his scuba-and-tweed collection. A year later, Claudia Schiffer was modelling the tailored Chanel look but in tight red leather. By the mid 1990s, Chanel had a sportier youthful vibe with tweed mini-skirts, bras and bolero jackets.

He was invariably a step ahead of everyone else, pursuing the new and totally absorbed by pop culture. However, at Chanel he would constantly mine the house’s heritage using archive images of Coco Chanel as young woman for inspiration whether it be her early years in Deauville; wearing country tweeds on her lover the Duke of Westminster’s highland estate; elegantly dressed in gold for a Cecil Beaton portrait; or larking about in sailor clothes on a beach with friends – and then he would create a whole collection around that look. He would find a theme and work it through such as the tech-inspired ready-to-wear collection of SS17, with its matrix pattern and motherboard tweeds, robot masks and computer geek baseball caps worn twisted to the side.

At times he took the modernising to extremes with logo-mad skiwear in 2001, the supermarket loungewear of AW14, plastic earrings and space-age accessories. However, as the seasons progressed and the house’s fortunes grew, so did the scale of the shows, the exotic locations for the cruise and métiers d’Art collections and the lavish sets built in the Grand Palais for ready-to-wear and haute couture.

There was the Chanel-stocked supermarket, the rocket ship, a reproduction of the Eiffel Tower, a forest of trees, a villa in the south of France for the recent haute couture show and last October a beach with crashing waves on the sandy shore. It was a beautiful requiem collection for such a talented polymath. Models in giant straw sunhats wandering through the waves in little tweed or black chiffon minidresses with sandals in hand drifting into the sunset, as now has their creator.

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