THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 19
1
PARISPOSTCARD
THELAGERFELDECONOMY
W
hen Karl Lagerfeld died, in Feb-
ruary, “fashion and culture lost a
great inspiration,” Bernard Arnault, the
C.E.O. and chairman of L.V.M.H., said.
A handful of businesses in Paris also lost
a major patron, a one-man stimulus pack-
age who for decades had primed their
margins and their creativity. The Lager-
feld District: a quilted clutch of bonnes
adresses along the Tuileries and the gar-
dens of the Champs-Élysées, not far from
the headquarters of Chanel, where he
was the creative director. The collapse of
the Lagerfeld economy wasn’t cata-
strophic—Colette, one of his favorite
boutiques, had already closed, in 2017—
but his absence continues to be felt on
shop floors around the city’s central ar-
rondissements. “Karl liked to say that he
was eleven per cent of our business,” Dan-
ielle Cillien Sabatier, the director of Gali-
gnani, the bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli,
said the other day. When a visitor asked
if the figure was accurate, she didn’t cor-
rect it. “He was certainly our No. 1 client.”
Lagerfeld went into Galignani once
or twice a week. In a replica of his office
that he once exhibited, shopping bags
from the store cover every surface. “Once,
we changed colors, from dark blue to
light blue, and Karl said, ‘Oh, it’s the blue
of Lanvin,’” Sabatier recalled. “I said, ‘No,
it’s the blue of my eyes.’” An author and
Karl Lagerfeldpublisher himself, Lagerfeld was a bib-
liophile of epic appetite. (Practically a
bibliophage, he is said to have torn the
pages out of thick paperbacks as he read
them.) He bought French books, En-
glish books, books of poetry, signed books,
first editions, monographs, everything
he could find on the Wiener Werkstätte.
“Our booksellers knew the themes of his
fashion shows long before they hap-
pened,” Sabatier said. “Sometimes we
were thinking, This is awkward, what is
he preparing? He’d buy dozens of books
on astronauts, and, months later, there’d
be a rocket at the Grand Palais.”
“Karl Kaiser,” the French journalist
Raphaëlle Bacqué’s biography of Lager-
feld, has been a recent best-seller at Gali-
gnani. Near the fine-arts desk, there is a
little shrine to him: a framed portrait, a
photograph he took of a model posing
in front of the shop’s windows. He might
have been a monster boss (“I have no
human feelings,” he once claimed), but
he was apparently a peach of a customer.
“He was very nice to everyone,” Sabatier
said, pointing out another framed pho-
tograph, of Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Bir-
man cat, Choupette, her head poking
out of a Galignani bag. Lagerfeld had
shot it for a window display and then
given it to Sabatier for her office. She
and several of her colleagues attended
his memorial service. “I think it was real
luck to come across such an incredible
personality, and to see him in such sim-
ple conditions,” she said.
A few doors down, at Hilditch & Key,
shirtmakers since 1899, Philippe Zubrzy-
cki, the store’s manager, lit up when La-
gerfeld’s name was mentioned. Monsieur
Lagerfeld, he said, ordered around a hun-
dred and fifty made-to-measure garments
a year: nightshirts, kimonos, the white
button-downs with collars like neck braces
that had been his signature look since he
lost ninety-two pounds over the course
of a year by drinking protein shakes and
eating nothing after 8 P.M. “He also or-
dered sleeveless ones, for painting,” Zub-
rzycki said. A client of long standing, La-
gerfeld had cycled through different looks.
At one point, when he was spending time
at a château in Brittany, he had a taste
for billowing shirts made in taffeta.
“Sometimes he’d put in an order for fifty
pieces and, over the weeks, the order
would grow,” Zubrzycki said, acknowl-
edging that Lagerfeld’s patronage was“fairly consequential.” Lagerfeld sent
sketches for his orders by fax or courier,
but he was open to suggestions from
Hilditch & Key’s salespeople and tailors.
“He loved when we made propositions,
and often he’d say, ‘Oui, bingo!’”
Lagerfeld’s florist was Lachaume, a
hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old fam-
ily business on the Rue du Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, where Marcel Proust went
each morning to purchase an orchid for
his buttonhole. Caroline Cnocquaert and
Stéphanie Primet, its sister proprietors,
responded immediately to a reporter’s
invitation to talk about Lagerfeld, writ-ing, “With great pleasure, he was our
dream client!” The first time Lagerfeld
came into the shop, in 1971, he bought
“a very beautiful big white rose” from
their grandmother, Giuseppina. An hour
later, the sisters recalled, Yves Saint Lau-
rent showed up, asking their mother, Co-
lette, for exactly the same flower. When
iPhones came out, Lagerfeld gave one
to each sister, so that he could send them
texts and images (“That was his word,
rather than saying ‘photos’”). He hated
holidays, when his ateliers were closed,
and would take advantage of the fact that
Lachaume stayed open, sending mes-
sages or coming in to chat. Cnocquaert
and Primet had been very sad when La-
gerfeld died, but, they said, “let’s think
of the future, that’s what Monsieur La-
gerfeld did.” They’d have their memo-
ries, they said, of his incredible orders.
“We created thousands of bouquets!”
—Lauren CollinsMrs. Met made the rounds, greeting
fans. She does not speak. When asked
where she got married, she pointed down
to indicate “here.” Citi Field? A nod.
Uh, wait, so, how long have you been
married—the wedding wasn’t at Shea?
Mrs. Met shook her head and covered
her face with her big white-gloved hands.
“Have there been multiple Mrs. Mets?”
a bride wondered aloud. “You never hear
about the Mets divorces.” As it happened,
the original couple that filled the mas-
cot suits called it quits after twenty-five
years. But getting married is kind of like
rooting for the Mets, isn’t it? The slogan
is “Ya gotta believe.”
—Betsy Morais