Photo by Wallpaper
We’ve heard about designers doing some crazy things, but this one may just take the prize. For Chanel’s Fall/Winter 2010 show Karl Lagerfeld imported a massive 265-ton glacier from northern Sweden, where over the course of six days 35 sculptors (flown in from around the world) whittled the icy block down to a 28-foot tall frozen landscape. For this brief one-time show, the Grand Palais itself was also kept at subzero temperature for extra Arctic effect. While we ‘re not quite sure how keen Karl is to the whole global warming situation, his musing to reporters on the issue certainly says a lot: “Have you felt any warming this winter? Maybe that’s all nonsense, who knows.”
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It would be nice if journalists could do their research and get some facts straight BEFORE going live with an article. According to an Italian newspaper, the “glacier” is actually sculpted snow flown in from Sweden. It is neither a glacier nor an iceberg, it’s a snow sculpture.
@MB: to be clear, i’m not sure if this is an iceburg or glacier. but if you click the green ‘glacier’ link in the artice, it brings you to an article on icebergs.
i’d rather him ship an iceberg down than a piece of a glacier. if i had to guess, i’d say it’s an iceberg, as it would be much more complicated to get something under a glacier to actually pull it up from the ground. especially if it weighs 265 tons.
UG. Karl .. exactly how did you trasport that block of Artic ice to Paris and how much CO2 did it generate?
FAIL.
There might be an impact if this were done routinely by entire industries, but a single block of ice that size is infinitesimally small compared with a glacier. As a one-time event this has zero impact.
So this is actually an iceberg, not part of a glacier, right? I’m still going to boycott Chanel.
agreed klevine. waste of time and money, especially if they just discared it and let it melt afterwards…
the ‘glacier’ link is an article about icebergs, which are different. icebergs are just ice floating in water while glaciers are more a more complicated form of ice which are around for much longer spans of time and sculpt the land with their massive weight and have created a lot of the lakes we have today. just an fyi.
Isn’t there potentially a horrible impact from removing that much ice from a glacier? And a tremendous negative impact from transporting it? This seems like the negatives far outweigh any potential positives in terms of commentary.
I’m a bit confused why, lately, it seems sustainability blogs such as this one are so hesitant to criticize moves such as this one. I don’t mean to be offensive, but isn’t it the responsibility of these blogs to point out things like this – not just pass along items without weighing in on them?