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I thought this was an interesting, well-written article that portrays Lagerfeld in depth. I ultimately found it a bit tragic.
Direct links to The Guardian: Part I Part 2
'You'll think I'm a Madman'
An
eye-popping journey into the stratosphere of Karl Lagerfeld, the feared
and revered, gesso-coiffed, jewel-encrusted 68-year-old who rules the
£2bn-a-year House of Chanel
Read part 2John Colapinto
Sunday May 27, 2007
Guardian UnlimitedThe
headquarters of Chanel are situated in two adjacent 18th-century
buildings on the rue Cambon, in Paris, occupying a labyrinthine suite
of rooms on five floors, above a street-level Chanel boutique. One
evening last December, Karl Lagerfeld, the label's artistic director,
and 22 assistants - hair, make-up, shoes, jewellery, music - crammed
into a room on the complex's top floor to conduct a fitting for a
collection that was to be shown six days later in Monte Carlo. Many
male designers wear T-shirts and jeans not only to work but also at
runway shows - as if to suggest that they are somehow above the world
of trend and fashion they inhabit. Lagerfeld, who was dressed in a
tight Dior suit of broad grey and blue stripes, and a pair of aviator
sunglasses, disdains this practice. 'I don't think I'm too good for
what I'm doing,' he says. His starched shirt had a 4in-high collar that
fit snugly under his chin, and his hair - whitened with a gesso-like
dry shampoo - was pulled into a ponytail. His large belt buckle was
encrusted with diamonds; his tie, looped with silver chains, was fixed
with a jade Cartier clasp from the Twenties. He was wearing fingerless
black biker gloves that bore silver grommets, etched with the Chanel
logo, on each knuckle and were equipped, at the wrists, with small zips
that carried faintly S & M overtones. 'Très chic, non?' he said,
holding up a hand to be admired. A chunky Chrome Heartsring adorned his
little finger, over the glove.
Lagerfeld
took a seat at a long table at one end of the room. Sipping from a
glass of Coke Zero - fresh glasses were brought to him at intervals on
a lacquer tray by an assistant - he surveyed the fitting model, a
baby-faced woman with a slim, ideally proportioned body, which
Lagerfeld nevertheless judged to be a little plump. 'She has maybe two
kilos that she should lose,' he whispered to his top assistant,
Virginie Viard. Over the next three hours, the model tried on a series
of garments that Lagerfeld had spent the previous six weeks conceiving:
embroidered tweed skirt suits, tulle dresses festooned with camellias
and skin tight flannel-Lycra pants. Each garment provoked swooning
cries from his retinue:
'Oooo la, Karl!'
'Très jolie!'
'Superbe!'
Lagerfeld
accepted the praise with a shrug. 'I do my job like I breathe,' he
said, in his customary manner - rapid, declamatory speech made more
emphatic by a heavy German accent. 'So if I can't breathe I'm in
trouble!'
Since
Lagerfeld took over Chanel in 1983, more than a decade after the death
of its founder, Coco Chanel, it has become one of the most profitable
luxury brands in the world, with revenues estimated at more than $4bn a
year. (The company is privately owned and does not release earnings
figures.) A significant portion of the income comes from sales of
accessories and make-up, and from No 5 perfume, created by Chanel
herself, in 1921. But accessories and perfume cannot sustain a fashion
brand's prestige; the company must also stage extravagant runway shows
featuring garments of outlandishness, originality and fantastic
expense. Lagerfeld, despite being nearly twice the age of many of his
competitors (he admits to 68), has been able, season after season, to
generate excitement and demand for Chanel's clothes. 'His major
strength is to be about his business in the present and never have a
moment for other people to think that he's passé,' Michael Roberts,
fashion director of Vanity Fair and a friend of Lagerfeld's for 30
years, says. Lagerfeld has maintained his pre-eminence for five
decades, and without any visible sign of strain - unlike his
contemporary Yves Saint Laurent, who, until he retired in 2002, took a
Proustian attitude to designing collections, experiencing nervous
breakdowns over the hemline juste. 'Yves pursued the goal of poetic
designer suffering for his art,' Roberts says. 'I can't imagine Karl
for one minute sitting down and thinking: I'm going to suffer for my
art. Why should he? It's just dresses, for God's sake.'
Until
recently, Lagerfeld produced eight collections a year for Chanel, five
for the Italian luxury label Fendi, and several for labels under his
own name - a staggering workload. In 2002, he added an extra Chanel
show to his schedule: a high-end ready-to-wear collection designed to
profile the work of the Paris métiers d'art - the ateliers that create,
by hand, the embroideries, beading, tulle flowers, hats and shoes on
which couture designers rely. The first of these so called 'satellite'
collections was shown in 2002, in Paris, and it was such a commercial
success that Chanel decided to give similar shows a permanent place on
its calendar and to stage them in different cities.
Lagerfeld's
ability to create so much clothing for three different labels makes him
unique among fashion designers, but he is also a photographer whose
work appears in glossy magazines around the world. He shoots the Chanel
press kits and catalogues that accompany the collections, as well as
fine-art photography, which he periodically displays in galleries. (He
recently had a solo exhibition in Berlin.) An avid reader in four
languages - English, French, German, and Italian - Lagerfeld also
publishes books; his imprint, a division of the German house Steidl, is
called Édition 7L, and a few years ago he opened a bookstore, also
called 7L on the rue Lille. Édition 7L has published 41 titles, on
subjects that range across his many interests, which include (besides
fashion and photography) literature, humour, advertising, music,
mythology, illustration and architecture. Some have a bracing
impracticality: an anthology of the first 10 years of the magazine
Interview weighed 43kg and was packaged in a wooden trolley of
Lagerfeld's devising.
In
2002, however, Lagerfeld published a best seller, The Karl Lagerfeld
Diet, which he co-wrote with his physician, Jean-Claude Houdret. 'If
you attach no importance to weight problems, if not being able to wear
new, trendy small-sized clothes does not cause you any regret, this
book is not for you,' Lagerfeld writes in the foreword. The book
combines sound weight-loss advice (cut calories) with idiosyncratic
notions (avoid eating between 8pm and 8am), but what made it popular
were the anecdotes about his own dramatic weight loss.
From
the late Eighties through the Nineties, he was a mountainous man in
tent-like black suits by Japanese designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, a
fan constantly a flutter at his neck. In 2000, Lagerfeld declared this
look démodé, and decided to remake his silhouette to resemble that of
the reedy teenage boys who stalked the catwalks at Dior Homme in slim
jackets and trousers by Hedi Slimane. In a year, Lagerfeld lost 92lb,
enabling him to squeeze into these suits, and he has kept the weight
off. ('I eat next to nothing,' he says.) Lagerfeld's
self-transformation coincided with a burst of new activity. In November
2004, he designed a clothing line for H&M, which plastered its
stores with Lagerfeld's image projected on two storey-high billboards.
Most of the clothes sold out in the first two days, and Lagerfeld
achieved a level of fame usually reserved for pop stars and movie
idols. 'I can no longer walk in the street,' he says. 'That's over.'
The
fitting model strutted forward in a new outfit and posed in front of
Lagerfeld. He scrutinised her through his dark glasses and frowned. He
said that he did not like the way the assistant had arranged the
neckline of the sweater the model wore. Several assistants converged on
her and began to tug uncertainly at the fabric.
'Non, non!' Lagerfeld said.
He
uncapped a black marker and, rings clacking, made a quick sketch on a
pad in front of him. Lagerfeld describes many of his colleagues as
'playing the designer' because they drape fabric on a model or a dummy;
he conceives his collections at a kind of platonic remove, in
multicoloured drawings on paper, and only rarely touches fabric. The
picture he produced - a swift hash of lines suggesting a soignée woman
- reflected his skill as an illustrator. An assistant looked at the
drawing and hustled to the model to make adjustments. Lagerfeld ripped
the drawing from the pad, crushed it in his hands, and tossed it into a
large wicker hamper, which over the course of the evening filled with
similar small masterpieces. 'I throw everything away!' he declared.'
The most important piece of furniture in a house is the garbage can! I
keep no archives of my own, no sketches, no photos, no clothes -
nothing! I am supposed to do, I'm not supposed to remember!' He
smoothed a gloved hand over the empty page in front of him and visibly
relaxed.
Unlike
creative people who fear the blank page, Lagerfeld has a horror of the
full page, the page that cannot be altered - the page that possesses
the power to bore. All successful fashion designers are boredom
detectors, on the alert for when a look is no longer novel but
ubiquitous. It can be easy to miss the boredom in Lagerfeld because
he's so fleet, so mercurial - so busy. But his frenzied multi tasking
suggests the depths his boredom could reach if it were allowed to gain
a purchase on him. He has devoted his existence to living as much as
possible in the present, keeping himself attuned to trends, not just in
fashion but in art, politics, movies and music. 'I go to Colette,' he
says, referring to the eclectic boutique on the rue Saint-Honoré. 'I
buy all the new things, I buy all the music magazines, listen to new
music.' (Last year, he released Karl Lagerfeld: My Favorite Songs, a
two-disk CD that included selections by hipster artists like Devendra
Banhart, LCD Soundsystem, the Fiery Furnaces, and Stereolab, as well as
Siouxsie and the Banshees, the bandleader Xavier Cugat, and Igor
Stravinsky.) Famous among his friends for his capacity to absorb
information, Lagerfeld is also renowned for his ability to translate
what he consumes into fashion. 'He said to me once, almost in a worried
way, that he has to find out everything there is to know, read
everything,' Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld's 'muse', says. 'The
curiosity is ceaseless.'
Lagerfeld's
determination to stay current requires ruthlessness and a lack of
sentimentality. He periodically rids himself of art, objects and places
that, previously, had been sources of inspiration and pleasure. People
are not exempt. 'He kind of passes on, because he doesn't like the
past,' one of the people who travels in Lagerfeld's circle says. 'So
then he decides you're the past and then he just puts you in the
trash.' Lagerfeld says, 'I have an entourage of people of today.
Because people can work with me for a hundred years but they have to
stay informed. And no regrets, no remove, not saying, "Oh, things were
better then."' According to his publishing partner Gerhard Steidl, when
Lagerfeld reads a thick paperback, he tears out the pages as he
finishes them.
Paradoxically,
Lagerfeld is a devotee of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and he has
been a serious collector of Art Deco. His passion for history is
reflected in his dress, a mixture of the contemporary (Dior jackets
worn with skin tight Diesel jeans) and the self-consciously retro,
including antique jewellery and custom shirts by Hilditch & Key,
with high, stiff collars that recall gentlemen like Walther Rathenau,
an early-20th-century German Jewish industrialist who was the model for
a character in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Count
Harry Kessler, a 19th century Anglo-German art patron who ran a small
publishing house, wrote several volumes of diaries (which Lagerfeld has
read) and was legendary for his dandified style of dress. To Lagerfeld,
Rathenau and Kessler represent all that was noble about Weimar Germany.
'I'm German in my mind,' Lagerfeld says, 'but from a Germany that
doesn't exist any more.'
Lagerfeld's
love of blending past and present is obvious in his description of his
new home on the Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank. Having purchased four
apartments on two floors of a 200-year-old building overlooking the
Louvre, he is gutting the place and constructing a townhouse. The upper
floor will contain only furniture and art made after the year 2000,
including pieces by the Bouroullec brothers, Marc Newson and others.
The lower floor, Lagerfeld says, 'is the Old World'; it will feature a
large library furnished with pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries,
as well as from his Art Deco collection. Living in the house will be
'like floating in your own spaceship over a very civilised past',
Lagerfeld says. (Some years ago, he bought a mansion in Biarritz,
where, he says, he spent millions of dollars refurbishing it, staffed
it with servants, and stocked it with 150,000 of his books. In 2006,
after realising he had not visited the place in two years, he sold it.)
In preparation for the move to the Quai Voltaire, Lagerfeld recently
sold the house where he has lived for the past 30 years, an 18,000sqft
mansion on the rue de l'Université, and one afternoon in early December
he was in the process of moving out. The house, a converted hôtel
particulier built in the late 1700s, is shielded from the street by a
towering porte cochere and sits beyond a cobblestone courtyard where a
white-coated valet greets visitors and leads them into a foyer the size
of an average two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Through a doorway off
the foyer is a room with gold-leaf mouldings, a painted ceiling, a vast
crystal chandelier and a table 40ft long, surrounded by straight-backed
chairs. Lagerfeld calls this 'the most beautiful room in all of Paris',
and says that it was designed by Jacques Verberckt, who decorated rooms
at Versailles. But he prefers to entertain guests next door, in a
small, less formal room whose walls he has lined with rare German
advertising posters from before the First World War. At the centre of
the room area boxy Bauhaus sofa and an umbrella-like modernist lamp. In
one corner, propped against the ornate moulding, is a life-size
cardboard cut out of Lagerfeld, glowering in dark glasses, from the
H&M advertising campaign.
Lagerfeld
agreed to give a tour of the house. After warning, 'You will think I'm
a madman,' he led the way up a grand curving marble staircase. The
second floor is composed of huge rooms with soaring ceilings, ornate
plasterwork, wood panelling and 15ft-high mirrors. The furniture, a
mixture of antique and modernist pieces, was almost impossible to see,
hidden under hundreds of magazines, CDs, photographs, promotional
brochures and books, which lay in heaps spilling one very surface,
including the floors. Scattered through the rooms were dozens of iPod
nanos of every hue. Each one was loaded with songs that Lagerfeld
listens to when designing his collections, which he does, he says,
usually in the mornings, while dressed in a long white smock. Surveying
the scene through his black glasses, Lagerfeld said serenely: 'Normal
people think I'm insane.'
Part 2
'You'll think I'm a Madman', part 2
Read part 1John Colapinto
Sunday May 27, 2007
ObserverHe
spends most of his time in a 1,000sqft room, at the centre of which sat
a modern four-poster bed. The posts were made of fluorescent bulbs, and
a sable bedspread was strewn with paperbacks and magazines and more
iPods. Lagerfeld says that he sleeps seven hours a night in this bed;
he also spends considerable time lounging on it during his waking
hours, reading and drawing. There was a large desk a few feet away,
piled with papers, sketchbooks, magazines, books, newspapers and art
supplies. Lagerfeld complains that his desk kept getting 'buried'. To
deal with the problem, he recently bought four more desks. They got
buried, too. A Mac G5 computer was visible among the messy stacks of
books and papers on a long table at the foot of his bed, but Lagerfeld
insists that he rarely uses it and does not surf the Internet - partly
because he is fearful of how it might compromise his privacy. 'I don't
want to be on the Internet,' he said. 'I hardly use a credit card -
everything where you can be fixed. I'm floating. Nobody can catch me,
mmm?'
He led the
way into a room that had a huge table heaped with more books, CDs,
DVDs, photographs, iPods and magazines. 'Look,' he said, sounding a
little amazed. 'It goes on and on and on.' He considered for a moment.
'But I love it!' He claims to know where everything is, and it's not an
idle boast. On several occasions during the afternoon, he disappeared
into these rooms to fetch things, including a copy of the Colette novel
Mitsou, which provided the inspiration for a recent Chanel photo
campaign that he had shot, and a copy of The Emperor's New Clothes
which he had illustrated with paintings made entirely with cosmetics.
He returned in minutes with the books.
'This
is the room for the jeans, the shirts, the jewellery, the ties, the
gloves and things like this,' he said, entering a narrow room lined
with shelves. On the top of a bureau were perhaps 200 pairs of
fingerless gloves, arranged in neat piles according to colour (he
explained that he chose the grey pair he's wearing because of the
overcast sky). There are also dozens of pairs of jeans, and belts laid
out by the hundred. In a tray on another bureau were tangles of Chrome
Hearts necklaces, rings, buckles, clasps, pins, and brooches; on
shelves below, scores of white shirts were stacked. Next door was a
windowless room containing a dozen garment racks on wheels, each one
stuffed with suits - perhaps 500 in all - in black or grey hues. 'I
have suits here I've never worn,' Lagerfeld said. 'To normal people it
may look sick, huh?' He shrugged. 'I don't know what "normal" means,
anyway.' He went into a room that looked like a bookstore stock room
during the Christmas season, and suddenly his attention was caught by a
stack of dusty leather-bound tomes. 'This is something I want to
publish,' he said, opening one of the books. 'This is the first German
illustrated weekly paper, called the Neue Berliner Illustrierte. And
thank God it was preserved, because very little survived. This is a
complete set. I just found it in Germany.'
In
a small anteroom, amid more heaped books and magazines, was a
black-and-red grand piano of sleek modernistic design. 'I designed this
for the 150th anniversary of Steinway,' Lagerfeld said. 'I'm not very
gifted as a piano player, so I'm giving it away as a Christmas gift.'
At the base of a small armchair were six plastic bags stuffed with
folded papers. 'These are newspapers I bought and haven't had time to
read yet,' he said. 'I go through the most important, and the rest are
unimportant things - they can wait.
'Last
September, Alicia Drake, a British fashion writer based in Paris,
published a book titled The Beautiful Fall, a chronicle of the fashion
demimonde of Paris in the Seventies and of a bitter rivalry that arose
between Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. The designers declined to
talk to Drake, but she managed to interview Lagerfeld's 89-year-old
cousin Kurt months before he died, as well as some friends, colleagues,
mentors and muses whom Lagerfeld has become estranged from over the
decades: Anna Piaggi, a longtime contributor to Italian Vogue; Gilles
Dufour, a former protégé and assistant for 25 years; Gaby Aghion, a
former mentor and a co-founder of the label Chloé, where Lagerfeld
worked for two decades; and the designer Paloma Picasso. Drake argues
that Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg, not in 1938, as he has long
claimed, but in 1933 - a fact attested to by his cousin Kurt, a
schoolmate and a neighbour. Lagerfeld reacted to the book with rage.
'It's the dirtiest thing in the world,' he told me. 'Everything is
fixed; there's not one person I know well who talked - only people I
had fired, or whom I hardly know, or who never existed.' He sued Drake
for invasion of privacy. (On 15 January, a French court dismissed
Lagerfeld's suit, and he was ordered to pay Drake's legal fees.)
Drake's book also includes admiring descriptions of Lagerfeld's designs
and work ethic, but Lagerfeld was not appeased. 'Maybe I don't want to
seem hardworking!' he told me.
Lagerfeld's
parents were cultured people whose idea of small talk was to debate the
religious philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin over dinner. Christian
Lagerfeld, his father, made a fortune in condensed milk; his mother,
Elisabeth, played the violin. In the mid-Thirties, as Hitler rose to
power, Lagerfeld's father moved the family to an isolated country
estate in northern Germany, where Karl, his older sister and a
half-sister from his father's first marriage were raised. Lagerfeld has
said that he knew nothing of the Nazis and the war; but, according to
Drake's interviews with Kurt Lagerfeld (whose credibility Karl has
challenged) and with neighbours of Karl's, the Lagerfeld family
suffered severe deprivations. In a letter that Lagerfeld wrote to
Drake, and which was quoted extensively in Women's Wear Daily, the
designer refuted this characterisation: 'There was food all the time
and [your] description of the end of the war is very romantic, but it
was very different... The farmers were not poor people with three
cows.' In a PS, he added, 'I felt loved and protected by my parents -
in a time like the Forties, when it was not easy to have a protected
life.'
As a
boy living in the country, Lagerfeld had little exposure to high
fashion. He found a book on Paul Poiret, the French designer who in
1906 created a line of unstructured clothes that liberated women from
the corsetted constraints of 19th-century dresses, but he did not
attend a fashion show until he was in his early teens, after his family
had moved back to Hamburg. There, in the early Fifties, Lagerfeld saw a
Christian Dior show and a Jacques Fath show. 'I loved it - the mood,
what it projected, the idea of a life,' he says. 'Because I spent my
childhood thinking that I was born too late, that I had missed all this
fabulous life before the war, the ocean liners, the Orient Express.'
Dreary postwar Hamburg was hardly the place to try to recreate such a
life. 'My idea was - and this is precise in my mind - "Let's get out of
here,"' Lagerfeld says. His mother agreed, telling him, 'Here, there is
nothing for you to do. Germany is a dead country.'
Lagerfeld
moved to Paris while still in his teens. After he had been there for
two years, he saw an advertisement for an international design
competition sponsored by an organisation called the International Wool
Secretariat; he submitted sketches and fabric samples and won in the
coat category, for a long overcoat with a high neckline and a plunging
V-shaped opening in the back. (Yves Saint Laurent, then 17, won for a
cocktail dress, and the two became friends.) Lagerfeld was immediately
hired as a junior assistant at Balmain, the haute-couture house. The
work was gruelling; for three weeks after each collection, Lagerfeld
and the other assistants spent days sketching embroideries, flowers,
seams and silhouettes for pattern makers and buyers (photocopiers did
not yet exist). 'I thought the backstage atmosphere was terrible,'
Lagerfeld says. 'But I said to myself, "You're not here as a critic,
you're here to learn, so shut up and look."' After six months, he was
made apprentice to Pierre Balmain. But after three years he left -
'because I wasn't born to be an assistant'. For three years, he worked
as artistic director at the House of Patou, where he produced couture
collections in the style of the label's creator, Jean Patou. But by
1961 Lagerfeld had become impatient with designing formal,
made-to-measure clothing for rich women. Couture, he says, 'became very
dowdy and very bourgeois and it was just not trendy'. Lagerfeld decided
that the most innovative ideas in fashion were in ready-to-wear, a
branch of the industry long disdained by serious designers. He quit
Patou, and hired himself out as a freelance ready-to-wear designer.
He
was soon producing collections simultaneously for French, Italian,
English and German companies, including Chloé (where he became head
designer), Krizia, Ballantyne, Cadette, Charles Jourdan and Mario
Valentino, where he was received as an exciting new talent with a knack
for capturing cultural trends and obsessions in his designs. Drake
quotes Anne-Marie Muñoz, a fashion assistant who was a friend of
Lagerfeld's at the time: 'He designed shoes, bags, hair combs, blouses,
pens, tables... He was always flicking through books, passionate about
a subject, interested, surrounded by paper.' Lagerfeld also created
wardrobes for movies, opera and the theatre. In 1967, he added to his
list of clients Fendi, in Rome. 'They hired him to do the fur,' Joan
Juliet Buck, a writer and the former editor of French Vogue, who at the
time was a close friend, says. 'And he throws out these unbelievable
challenges: let's line fur in fur, let's knit fur, let's tear fur up,
let's make holes in fur, let's paint on fur, let's paint on shearling.'
Lagerfeld
was a conspicuous presence at parties in Paris and New York in the
Seventies, but he maintained a detached attitude, passing on the drugs
and alcohol in which his colleagues indulged. 'I observed it like an
inside outsider,' he says of the Seventies bacchanal. 'I have nothing
against it, but I have one instinct stronger than any other thing in
life, and that is the instinct for survival.'
In
the early Seventies, however, Lagerfeld fell in love with a witty and
mischievous French aristocrat named Jacques de Bascher. Lagerfeld
supported him financially, but they never lived together, and friends
say that the union was - as Lagerfeld has always insisted - platonic,
based on shared affinities for literature, clothing and style. (De
Bascher once told a journalist that Lagerfeld's sole loves were
Coca-Cola and chocolate cake.) When de Bascher died of Aids, in 1989,
Lagerfeld was inconsolable; he sobbed when discussing him with a
reporter for Vanity Fair in 1992. In his diet book, he says that his
weight gain, which began in the late Eighties, was due to his despair
over de Bascher's illness and death. Today, however, Lagerfeld insists
that he is above such attachments, adopting the attitude he expressed
in a conversation with Interview in 1975, in which he said: 'I never
fall in love. I am just in love with my job.' In this way, Lagerfeld
seems to be modelling himself on another prolific creator with a sense
of the zeitgeist, Andy Warhol. The two were friends; in the early
Seventies, Warhol cast Lagerfeld as an aristocratic German Lothario in
a film called L'Amour. 'Not a masterpiece,' says Lagerfeld, who
discourages comparisons between himself and Warhol. 'First of all, I'm
better groomed. And also, he pushed people. I never push people. There
was something more perverted in his mind than in mine.'
By
the early Eighties, Lagerfeld had become one of the world's most
respected and successful designers, though outside the fashion industry
his name was not widely known because, unlike other young designers
such as Pierre Cardin and Saint Laurent, he did not have his own label.
'When people were shoving their names on everything, he said, "I don't
care about that,"' Joan Juliet Buck says. 'He didn't believe in
building his own empire. He liked the gun-for-hire thing.' In 1982,
Alain Wertheimer, the chairman of Chanel, approached Lagerfeld about
designing for the label.
Coco
Chanel had died 11 years earlier, and sales had declined sharply. By
1982, the label was little more than a perfume company with some
clothing boutiques. The iconic Chanel suit - a tight-shouldered, boxy
tweed jacket and matching knee-length skirt - was seen as a dowdy
throwback for, as Buck put it, 'middle-aged lady politicians in the
provinces'. Lagerfeld's friends advised him not to accept Wertheimer's
offer. 'Everybody said: "Don't touch it, it's dead, it will never come
back,"' Lagerfeld says. 'But by then I thought it was a challenge.' The
job involved designing not only the Chanel ready-to-wear line but also
the haute couture - an area in which Lagerfeld had not worked for 20
years. But he sensed that the culture was changing. 'Ready-to-wear had
become like a kind of fake couture,' he says. 'So I said: "Let's do the
real stuff."'
But
the 'real stuff' had also changed. 'Before, fashion was easy, in a
way,' Lagerfeld says. 'There was the couture collection - people were
inspired by that, they copied it, and that was the fashion in the
world. Now fashion comes from the street, from other designers, from
ready-to-wear, so high fashion has to be the fashion of the moment.'
With these precepts in mind, Lagerfeld remade Chanel by acknowledging
the brand's history but treating it with irreverence. He lampooned the
Chanel suit, shrinking it into a micro mini and a midriff-baring
jacket; covering it with oversize double-Clogos; and pairing it on the
runway with quilted running shoes, sequined hot pants and giant neck
chains inspired by rappers. In doing so, he erased any hint of
bourgeois fustiness and created among the young, trendy and moneyed a
mania for the label.
Lagerfeld's
bad-girl take was contrary to everything that Chanel herself had stood
for: dignity, restraint and a style of clothing that allowed women to
dress in as confident and comfortable a manner as men do. Yves Saint
Laurent told Le Monde, 'At Chanel, they have chains everywhere, strips
of leather. I see things that are frightening, sado masochistic.' Holly
Brubach, writing in 1989 in the New Yorker, applauded Lagerfeld's
creative energy but accused him of 'desecrating the Chanel style with
sight gags and overkill, with a tarty sex appeal and crass
sensationalism'.
Lagerfeld
scoffs at such criticisms: 'They said, "Oh, Chanel would be shocked to
death!" But they didn't want the homage - the respectful shit - either.
So to survive you have to cut the roots to make new roots. Because
fashion is about today. You can take an idea from the past, but if you
do it the way it was, no one wants it.' Lagerfeld's success at
revitalising the Chanel brand inspired similar makeovers at other
fashion houses, including Gucci (which hired Tom Ford), Dior (John
Galliano), Louis Vuitton (Marc Jacobs), Lanvin (Alber Elbaz),
Balenciaga (Nicolas Ghesquière) and Burberry (Christopher Bailey).
'It's thanks to Karl and Chanel that all the other fashion companies
realised that they could use the name of a dead person,' Buck says. 'He
started the Lazarus movement.'
Five
days after the fitting at Chanel's rue Cambon headquarters, Lagerfeld
flew to Monte Carlo to prepare for the fashion show. He owns a house in
Monaco and travels there often, primarily to see his friend Princess
Caroline of Hanover, the daughter of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier.
Some 200 of Lagerfeld's closest friends - artists, editors,
photographers, models, actresses - and a large contingent of reporters
also converged on Monaco for two days of events related to the Chanel
fashion show.
The
morning Lagerfeld arrived, he held a final fitting for the collection,
which would be shown the next day on the stage of the Monte Carlo opera
house, before an audience of more than 450 people. At noon, he met with
his assistants in the opera house's cramped basement to choose the
accessories that the models would wear. After five hours, the
assistants looked glazed and morose in the airless, overheated room,
which was lit with harsh fluorescent lights. Lagerfeld, however,
remained energetic, full of laughter and catty asides. 'She's the
toughest dyke of all,' he muttered after a fierce-looking blonde model
had finished posing in front of him. He shouted instructions about the
clothes to his assistants and helped select jewellery and shoes, while
giving an interview to a reporter from Women's Wear Daily, who sat at
his right elbow.
A
few feet away, offering the occasional opinion about a necklace or a
pair of earrings, was Amanda Harlech, a lithe 47-year-old with black
hair and green eyes that slant upward. Since defecting, in 1997, from
the camp of John Galliano, to whom she had played muse for a dozen
years, Harlech has been fulfilling that role for Lagerfeld at Chanel.
'She is an inspiration, because she wears the clothes I make, and she
mixes them with other things and is very inventive herself,' Lagerfeld
says. 'And she creates an atmosphere that is very important.' Harlech
says, 'Officially, I'm the outside pair of eyes. The thing about Karl
is that he is never happy with what he's done. However perfect that
dress' - she gestures at a model wearing a black lace gown with a
smattering of flowers and frayed tulle at the sleeves - 'it already
begs the question of the next thing. The moment the show opens, he's
already foreseeing the actual set of the next one. This man never
alights. He's on the wing. Photographs, buildings, collections,
possessions.'
Lagerfeld,
who had been looking through a box filled with shoes, approached
Harlech. He leaned in close and mumbled a joke about a mutual
acquaintance who evidently suffered from 'fat legs and bad breath'.
Harlech whooped with laughter and wagged a finger at him. Lagerfeld
giggled, then turned a slow half-pirouette and returned to work.
Lagerfeld
likes to foster envy and competitiveness among his retinue. Everyone in
his entourage knows the stories of former favourites who were summarily
jettisoned, either for perceived slights and betrayals or because they
had begun to bore Lagerfeld. This makes for an anxious atmosphere, as
was clear that evening, when Lagerfeld hosted an informal dinner for
Princess Caroline and 100 or so friends. (A few fashion reporters were
also invited.) The dinner was at Rampoldi, a small French-Italian
restaurant that occupies a long, grotto-like space on Monaco's main
commercial street. The guests - who included the co-founder and editor
of the magazine Purple Fashion, Olivier Zahm, his face unshaven, his
long, unwashed brown hair falling around his shoulders - reflected
Lagerfeld's fascination with the Parisian hipsters from whom he draws
ideas for his collections. Lagerfeld greeted Camille
Bidault-Waddington, the stylist, who is married to Jarvis Cocker. Tall,
slim and doe-eyed, Bidault-Waddington, who has never styled for
Lagerfeld, was under no illusions about the reason for her inclusion in
Lagerfeld's entourage. 'Basically, I'm good friends with them, and I
like their stuff, and because I'm funny, they invite me everywhere,'
she said. 'For ambience, let's say.' (The next day, Lagerfeld noticed
the top-stitching on the pockets of her Chloé dress. 'He said it was a
special stitch, and he named it,' Bidault-Waddington said later. 'He
looked at it like some kind of specialist - like a doctor. He analyses
everything in a second.')
Also
at Rampoldi was rock musician Cat Power, whose real name is Chan
Marshall. Lagerfeld met Marshall last year, outside the Mercer Hotel in
New York. She was dressed in her habitual combination of jeans, T-shirt
and boots, and was smoking a cigarette while slouched on a pile of her
luggage. Lagerfeld was enchanted, telling her only a true woman could
get away with smoking like that. She is now a constant presence at
Lagerfeld's gatherings, flown to Chanel shows and events, at the
company's expense. (In January, Marshall and her band performed the
music for the Chanel couture show at the Grand Palais, in Paris.)
The
dinner was scheduled for 8.30, and by a quarter to nine most of the
guests had arrived. But an hour later there was still no sign of
Lagerfeld or Princess Caroline, and the mood was starting to sour.
Lagerfeld is famous for keeping people waiting, sometimes because of
work obligations but also sometimes for effect. Colombe Pringle, the
editor of French Vogue from 1987 to 1994, who has known Lagerfeld for
more than 30 years, strained in her seat to see the head table, where
his and the princess's chairs sat empty. Turning back to her
tablemates, she said, 'It's opera! They're building something! So
everyone is wondering: Why isn't he here, it's 10pm!' She laughed.
'Karlis on stage.' When Pringle was asked if she considered herself a
friend of Lagerfeld's, she frowned. 'You can never say you're a friend
of Karl's,' she said. 'He can only say that about you.' She lit a
cigarette. 'He's a diva.'
Finally,
Lagerfeld appeared with the princess and her daughter Charlotte. He was
in his usual white high-collared shirt, but he had traded his Dior suit
for one by a young Japanese design team. His black jacket was a modern
take on the 18th-century cut away, with lapels that buttoned back and a
slightly flaring tail. He did not remove his aviator sunglasses as he
took his place at the head table with the princess. Also with Lagerfeld
was a wholesome-looking model named Brad Kroenig, from St Louis, who is
the subject of a book of photographs by Lagerfeld called One Man Shown;
and Stephen Gan, a founding editor of the art magazine Visionaire. Gan
is a member of Lagerfeld's innermost circle; backstage at fashion
shows, Lagerfeld bestows on him the arm squeezes and whispered bon mots
that he reserves for his closest confidants. Gan was shown to the table
where Pringle was seated, and she demanded, 'Where were you?' Gan said
that he had joined Lagerfeld for cocktails. At this news, Gan's
tablemates visibly stiffened. Over dinner, the talk was of Karl: his
prodigious spending, his penchant for 'getting rid of what he loves',
his renunciation of sex.
At
the end of the meal, a waiter materialised and, in full view of the 40
or so other diners at the table, placed a small glass of Sauternes in
front of Gan, saying, with a quick nod toward Lagerfeld, at the head
table, that it was from 'the gentleman'. All eyes went from Lagerfeld -
impassive behind his black shades - to the glass of Sauternes, which
seemed to cower on the tablecloth. Gan smiled sheepishly before taking
a sip.
At a
few minutes past midnight, Lagerfeld, Caroline and Charlotte stood and
began to walk towards the door. The other guests crowded after them.
Lagerfeld lingered on the pavement outside for 20 minutes, saying
goodbye to the princess and her daughter as they stood by the open door
of a stretch limousine. Several feet away, a small group of Lagerfeld's
friends waited, among them Harlech, Gan, Bidault-Waddington and Zahm.
Royal protocol dictated that the guests should not approach or speak to
the princess without an invitation to do so.
'Look
at that schmooze!' a dark-haired woman said under her breath, as
Lagerfeld and the princess spoke animatedly to each other.
'What do you think they're saying?' her companion asked.
She
popped her lips as if to imply that the answer couldn't be more
obvious. 'Telling each other how marvellous they are!' she said. Ten
minutes later, Lagerfeld had seen the princess off and returned to his
friends. He approached the dark-haired woman, who smiled radiantly,
accepted Lagerfeld's air kisses, and told him that he looked marvellous.
At
10.30 the next morning, Lagerfeld arrived at the crowded backstage area
of the Monte Carlo opera house, where the fashion show was to begin 30
minutes later. He looked rested, even though he had been up until 4am,
drinking Coke Max and chatting with Gan, Kroenig and Harlech, and a few
others from Chanel - all of whom, despite being several decades younger
than Lagerfeld, looked distinctly the worse for wear. In the theatre's
basement, a dozen silent, waxen-faced models were draped over the
furniture in attitudes of apparent exhaustion; casting wistful look sat
a buffet table across the room. Finally, one model approached the
table. She selected a single grape from a bunch, inspected it
carefully, and ate it.
Lagerfeld
swept by, waggled his fingers at the models by way of a greeting, and
proceeded to a corner of the room, where a make-up artist was brushing
powder over a girl's face - executing in foundation, rouge, mascara and
lipstick Lagerfeld's directive to evoke both Audrey Hepburn and the
Ballets Russes. Then Lagerfeld, followed by five or six assistants,
climbed a short, unlit staircase, hurried through a maze of scrims, and
emerged onto the stage. Through the closed velvet stage curtain, he
could hear the guests taking their seats on the other side. Someone
asked him how he felt. His face, behind his dark glasses, did not
change. 'I have no human feelings,' he replied.
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