FIRST LOOK: CHANEL

"Omigosh, are the Chanel models wearing flats?!"

That was the first office outburst from yesterday, when Karl Lagerfeld showed his zillionth collection for Chanel in Paris. Besides the usual femme lace and leather trim, there was something surprising on Freja Beha and her model cohorts: stompy boots.

They were rough, and low to the ground, and gorgeous, and worn with pants that crumpled, rumpled, and imploded at the ground.

There are also skinny jeans - praise be! - in various slabs of black, sometimes worn with Chanel's traditional tweed over them, and often layered under a miniskirt or dress.

We were smitten with the modern, molten texture of the fabric, the tossed-in-the-back-of-a-car hairstyles, and of course, with the gunmetal gray nail polish that we'll be trying to copy for the next two weeks.

But it was these pants - a luxe and luscious version of the kind we dragged through the mud to junior high - that we're still talking about...

Click here to check out more looks and details from Chanel Fall / Winter 2011 in our galleries.