The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the Costume Institute Gala in New York City on Monday, May 2, 2005, opening the exhibition Chanel. The show re-created the spirit of the House of Chanel with more than fifty designs and accessories drawn from the Museum's Costume Institute collection, the Chanel Archives, and international institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It opened with a presentation of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's ground-breaking designs from the 1920s, among them a jersey dress and cardigan coat, an early example of the sportswear principle of separates dressing, and then examined the history of the house thematically, revealing ideas and elements of her biography as they were expressed in her work. Period examples were juxtaposed with the work of Karl Lagerfeld, who joined the House of Chanel in 1983 and revitalized its spirit and identity, so that the historic importance of Chanel was both defined and asserted for the modern woman.

Chanel's fashion career began in 1909 with a…