SELF-PORTRAIT BY KARL LAGERFELD/COURTESY OF CHANELARL IS DEAD’.The shock of the stark
headlines that announced Karl Lagerfeld’s
passing on the morning of February 19 were
like a bludgeon to the head. He had died in
Paris at the age of 85, serving to prove his
mortality, which some of fashion’s more
mischievous gossips had started to question.
t happens when I have gone,” he once told me
utely aware of the vacuum that would be left
with his death. “I am only interested in my work.”
Lagerfeld was fashion’s most prolific — and arguably most
powerful — designer, creating 10 collections per year for Chanel, as
well as Fendi’s womenswear and the ranges for his eponymous line.
He was a brilliant illustrator with a hand capable of drafting
distinctive soft-focus sketches at lightning speed as if it were an
automaton with a mind of its own. He was an established
photographer, shooting every Chanel advertising campaign from
1987 onwards, and those for Fendi, too. He was a filmmaker and
a respected publisher with his own imprint, 7L edition, and book-
store, 7L, on Paris’ Left Bank. And he was a collaborator with the
Midas touch. The first designer to collaborate with H&M in 2004
(which blazed a trail for a raft of other designer/high-street collab-
orations), Lagerfeld emblazoned his personal brand on everything
from Magnum to Diet Coke and, more recently, a line of beauty
products for Australia’s ModelCo.
“My thing is to work more than the others, to show them how
useless they are,” Lagerfeld quipped. “I was born to move ahead.”
The truth is that the mercurial and insomniac Lagerfeld needed
all these collections and projects as outlets for his insatiable desire
to create; a desire that was fed by devouring music, history
(Enlightenment-era Europe, in particular), books (at our last
encounter he was reading 10 books in three different languages),Remembering his scathing wit, cheeky disregard for the archives and truly
KARL LAGERFELD
1933 – 2019innovative creations, BAZAAR pays tribute to fashion’s formidable doyen
46 HARPERSBAZAAR.COM.AU April 2019
TRIBUTE