and whatever/whoever happened to be the Next Big Thing. His
obsessive curiosity, mixed with an indefatigable output and
Teutonic discipline, made Lagerfeld a true Renaissance man, whose
wit was sparkling (sometimes caustic), and whose conversations
— stammered out in his unmistakable staccato — were as rapid
and as unpredictable as a game of ping pong.
JH:You’ve done so much. Is there anything left for you to do?
KL: “You know, I’m so busy with what I am doing that I don’t
have to ask myself what could I do. I am so pleased that I can
do what I want to do in divine circumstances. So the other
people can do everything else. I don’t care.”
JH:What is your greatest achievement?
KL: “There is no achievement because in fashion you have
to do it all over again.”
JH:What is the single most important lesson you’ve learnt?
KL: “Expect nothing and you’ll not be disappointed. You’re
not supposed to be happy. Happiness is what we’re supposed
to strive for, non?”
Lagerfeld was born Karl Otto Lagerfeldt (he would later drop
the T for commercial reasons) in Hamburg in 1933 — or therea-
bouts. His year of birth is one of the great mysteries about his life,
often disputed to be 1935 or 1938. Until as recently as 2013,
Lagerfeld insisted that he was born in 1935 and that his mother,
Elisabeth, changed the year because it was easier to write.
Autobiographies and relatives are adamant that 1933 is correct.
Whatever the truth, Lagerfeld was keen to grow up fast. “As a child,
I had one idea — to get out and be free,” he told me. “I hated being
a child. The other children were so stupid.”
Elisabeth was instrumental in shaping
Lagerfeld through her critical commentary:
“If you want to talk to me you need to make
an effort. You are six and I am not. Either do
that or shut up.”
“Children with glasses are the ugliest thing
in the world.”
“If you smoke, you show the hands, and as
yours are not beautiful, you should not.”
It goes a long way to explaining why Lagerfeld
was never seen without his trademark fingerless
gloves and sunglasses, and why this polyglot
would quickly skip from German to French to
English to Italian at breakneck speeds.
The young and ambitious Lagerfeld moved
to Paris in 1952, entering the International
Wool Secretariat design competition (now
known as the International Woolmark Prize) two years
later. He won the first prize for the coat category (Yves
Saint Laurent was triumphant in the dress category)
and was awarded an apprenticeship with couturier
Pierre Balmain, who was on the judging panel. After three years at
Balmain and a stint as artistic director at Jean Patou, Lagerfeld
decided to make the switch from couture to ready-to-wear,
describing himself as a “gun for hire” (more recently as a “fashion
mercenary”), working with the likes of Fendi (from 1965 onwards),
Max Mara, Loewe, Krizia and Chloé (1963–83 and 1992–97).
“We are forever grateful for his 25 years with the Maison,” stated
Chloé’s tribute. “From his softly feminine, slightly irreverent designs,
to his strong visual instinct, he has inspired every designer at Chloé.”
Indeed, Lagerfeld’s first period at the label generated some of his
most iconic work, inspired as it was by German expressionism, art
deco and the heady bohemianism of the 1970s. Yet it would be his
fateful meeting in 1982 with Chanel co-owner Alain Wertheimer
that proved pivotal in his astronomic rise to superstardom.
“Mister Wertheimer said, ‘I’ve got this company. Try to make
something out of it or else I shall sell it.’ I was excited about this
project because everybody said, ‘Don’t touch it! It’s dead!’ And
what is more exciting than that?”
A deal was struck like that between Doctor Faustus and the
devil, Wertheimer giving Lagerfeld carte blanche to subvert Coco’s
bourgeois house ‘codes’ with doses of irony previously unseen in
the patrician circles of Parisian luxury fashion.
And so over the next 37 years, Lagerfeld happily stamped Chanel’s
double-C logo onto everything from surfboards to Minnie Mouse
ears; reimagined her polite two-tone shoes as moon boots and
pistol-heeled Mary Janes; pushed the boundaries of the gilt chained,
quilted leather handbag to become a metre-long baguette, a hula
hoop and even a travelling trunk. As for Chanel’s signature cardigan
jacket, Lagerfeld dragged it kicking and screaming from the dead by
slicing it from denim, plastic and even ‘disintegrated’ tweed.
“Intellectually, I raped her,” Lagerfeld said of Coco in our 2013
interview, the words causing his coterie of female assistants to
bristle. “I had to. If not it would have been a funeral. All I have to
do is to make it easy to identify so that people think it’s very
Chanel even if she never did it.”
Despite the sometimes heavy-handed fashion high jinks and the
deliberately shocking sound bites, Lagerfeld could dream up
clothes of unparalleled lightness and beauty that had their roots in
the old-world couture tradition. Slim-line frock coats beaded to
look like the Coromandel lacquer screens in Coco’s apartment;
cloud-like confections of silk-chiffon for the traditional La Mariée
finale; jackets that looked like bouclé tweed
but were actually 3000 hours’ worth of
embroidered tulle — Lagerfeld truly was the
last of a generation of couturiers who had
trained with the ancien régime.
In our last interview, I put it to Lagerfeld
that his life’s best work had been for Chanel.
“Maybe, but I don’t believe in success.
I believe in working and moving onto the next
one, and the next one. I am a machine.”
He even managed to achieve the seemingly
impossible with his runway shows. After he
turned the Great Wall of China into the world’s
longest runway — at nearly two and a half
kilometres — for Fendi in 2007, Lagerfeld
took Chanel to Paris’ Grand Palais to install a
265-tonne iceberg (A/W 2010); launch a
rocket (A/W 2017) and create an entire super-
marché with Chanel-branded goods (A/W 2014)
where Cara Delevingne and Rihanna were pushed
around in a shopping trolley like a pair of delinquent
bad gals. Cruise 2019 saw models parade around an
enormous model of a passenger ship.
“He changed my life,” Delevingne wrote on Instagram. “He
believed in me when so many others didn’t, including myself.”
It’s a fitting testament to a generous man, one who was a bril-
liantly curious mix of Andy Warhol (the poptastic factory output)
and France’s Sun King, Louis XIV (the autocrat who ruled over an
empire), with an instantly identifiable shorthand of his own
image: powdered ponytail, snake-hipped tailoring, big shades.
KL: “I am my own best bad joke.”
JH:“Do you realise that, for most of us, there has never been
a time when there hasn’t been Karl? There has always been
The Queen and there has always been Karl Lagerfeld.”
KL: “I’m sorry for you. But one day you will be lucky enough
to get rid of this one.”– JAMIE HUCKBODYKarl Lagerfeld’s illustration
for BAZAAR Australia’s
15th birthday appeared on
the March 2013 cover.47 HARPERSBAZAAR.COM.AU April 2019