The devil wears Chanel

Innovator. Genius. Icon. Tyrant. Holy terror.

Forget Prada. Clearly, the devil wears Chanel. Legendary French designer Coco Chanel - and her legendary temperament - are the subjects of a play receiving an unusual, one-night-only production at the Goat Farm Arts Center on March 13.

“There is a slight separation of the runway and the play, but they’re in dialogue with each other,” says Atlanta fashion designer Tian Justman, who will unveil her fall 2014 collection in tandem with Atlanta actress Park Krausen’s performance as Coco Chanel in playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès’ final unfinished play, Coco, which takes an unflinching look at the iconoclastic designer. “They weave their way in and out of each other,” Justman says.

“To me, it just kept making more and more sense,” says Krausen, whose theater company Theatre du Rêve frequently performs at the Goat Farm Arts Center where Justman also has her design studio. “Our impetus with TdR over the past few years is to ask the question, ‘How do we get different art forms in dialogue with one another?’”

For several years, Krausen had been interested in bringing Koltès’ unfinished portrait of Coco Chanel to the stage. The famous, unconventional, and rebellious French playwright died of AIDS in the late ’80s, and the various fragments of his final play about Chanel were found posthumously. Krausen says she was especially intrigued with the idea of bringing runway models wearing the work of a contemporary designer into a performance of the fragmented play, which imagines a meandering dialogue between Chanel and her maid during the final days of her life. Serendipitously, Justman was in the process of preparing her first show.

“All women’s fashion is inspired in some way, shape, or form by Coco Chanel,” says Justman, who is also creating the costumes for the play. “She’s very inspirational, not just for me, but for a lot of designers and a lot of female designers. She was the bull in the china shop of her time.” Justman is no stranger to the theater, having designed costumes for various productions around Atlanta, including for the theater group Saïah’s 2011 production Rua; Wülf and for the dancers of gloATL in 2013’s Hippodrome. “I feel like I’ve been immersed in the performance world for the past few years,” she says. “Now I’m in transition to focus a bit more on fashion. ... The Atlanta fashion industry is at a really exciting point right now. There are a handful of designers that have chosen to stay in Atlanta and not go to New York or L.A. They’re really starting to come together as a community in Atlanta in the right way.”

The event, which takes place in the Goodson Yard building on the Goat Farm property, includes the option of a Chanel-inspired dinner of paired courses and wine, hosted by Patrick La Bouff’s Dinner Party Atlanta and chef Craig Richards.

“We’ve never done anything like it before,” Krausen says. “It could be the most glorious evening, and it could also be disastrous. We’re all just fearlessly going into it. That’s really exciting to me, that we all said yes. We all have each other’s backs.”

In the end, all of it will be in contemplation of the legacy of a fashion icon, one who still has the power to inspire, provoke, even enrage. “Koltès has a certain musicality and poetry to his writing, but there’s also a hardness to it,” says Krausen. “He captures the voice of a woman who thinks she’s always right, that what she says is always a fact. People always said of her, ‘She was fantastic. She was undeniable. She was a despot.’ I feel like he took that to heart.”

SO COCO. Thurs., March 13 at 8:00 p.m. $35-1500. Goodson Yard at The Goat Farm Arts Center, 1200 Foster St. For tickets call 404-875-3829 or purchase online at sococo at brownpapertickets.com.