Karl Lagerfeld showed Chanel's Fall 1991 ready-to-wear in Paris in March, and the line he gave the wire reporters that week was that the models were dressed "just like a Christmas tree." He meant the chains. Layered gold chains, stacked CC pendants, cuffs, hoops, dog collars, the camellia turned into hardware hanging off a mesh body stocking. Vogue called it taking the house "to the edge of an abyss of kitsch and funk." Reuters described models tearing off black vinyl trench coats to expose sheer mesh catsuits, to a Madonna soundtrack. The collection has been called Lagerfeld's hip-hop show ever since.

The framing is half right. There is hip-hop in the styling, the CNN retrospective on the show makes the case at length, and the layered gold and baseball caps and oversized chains were unmistakably borrowed from a New York street vocabulary that European luxury had spent the previous decade not noticing. But the Madonna soundtrack and the Boy Toy plaques and the conical-bra-adjacent silhouettes point somewhere else too. This was a "Like a Virgin" turn as much as a hip-hop one, two American provocations folded into the same Cambon set.

What made it work, and what makes it still readable now, was that Lagerfeld did not abandon the Chanel codes in order to do this. He doubled them. Quilted leather is a Chanel signature; the Fall 1991 show paired quilted biker jackets with tulle ball skirts. Tweed is a Chanel signature; Karen Mulder walked in a frayed denim mini and a curve-hugging pink tweed jacket. The chain belt is a Chanel signature; here it became a gladiator belt, gold and oversized, the CHANEL wordmark reading like a nameplate. None of these were new vocabulary. They were existing vocabulary turned up loud enough to refuse the dignified register the house had been trained into.

The cast did the rest. Linda Evangelista, Karen Mulder, Helena Christensen, Kristen McMenamy, the same names that were carrying every other March 1991 Paris show. The supermodel era is sometimes flattened into a single mood, but the Chanel show that month sat in deliberate contrast to what the rest of Paris was doing. Valentino's couture in the same window was about gravitas. Lagerfeld answered with chains over tweed and a Madonna track loud enough to make the front row flinch.

It is easy to read this now as cynical, a luxury house mining a Black American street vocabulary for runway shock value with no intention of returning the favour. That reading is also half right. The same Women's Wear Daily issue that month put a "Rap Attack" cover together, and the racial coding around the trend in mainstream fashion press was uncomfortable then and reads worse now. Lagerfeld was doing what Lagerfeld always did, which was synthesise on top of whatever signal was in the air, with limited interest in the source. The show's afterlife in hip-hop itself, which CNN traces through Dapper Dan and onward, ended up being more generous to the house than the house was to its inputs.

Still, the show stuck. It stuck because it was built out of Chanel codes rather than against them, and because Lagerfeld understood that a luxury house's signatures only stay alive if they are allowed to behave badly in public every few years. The Christmas tree line was throwaway, but it was honest. He had stacked the codes until they sparkled and clinked and looked slightly absurd, and the absurdity is what kept them legible.

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