what does "a light touch"mean? The answer was to innovate. Like Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld knew how to be of his own time; moreover, he understood how to be himself without making a fetish of it. Here and there, when moved to do so, Lagerfeld, in each of his collections for Chanel, paid tribute to the spirit of the Grande Mademoiselle, sometimes with irony and a light touch, sometimes with respect and admiration, always by way of some witty quotation. Never did Lagerfeld play the copyist. Rather, he proceeds like a great composer working through a set of variations on a given theme—a theme with the name Chanel.