DosViolines
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I posted this yesterday, but it seems to have disappeared
source: nymetro.com
First part
source: nymetro.com
First part
Karl Lagerfeld, Boy Prince of Fashion
Down Fifth Avenue they come, the fragrant and bejeweled hordes, having said their bons mots at Derek Lam’s cocktail party at Barneys and a Tom Ford perfume launch at Saks, and now clippity-clopping their way ever closer to the opening of the exquisite new Fendi boutique on 53rd Street. It is 8 p.m., still early enough for tourists to stroll about and city buses to zoom by, and also too early for the arrival of Karl Lagerfeld, designer of Chanel, Fendi, Lagerfeld Collection, a new Karl Lagerfeld line, and “the reason we are all here!” Half an hour before the event is supposed to end, Lagerfeld remains at his suite at the Mercer, and it’s whispered that he will not leave because he cannot find a thing to wear. Soon, Silvia Fendi, the handsome blonde daughter of the LVMH-owned house, is packed in a Town Car and sent downtown to work some magic, or at least appeal to Lagerfeld’s nobler side, because Lagerfeld is nothing if not noble.
What can one talk about while waiting for Lagerfeld? Lagerfeld, of course. “Karl has the energy of . . . what? Twenty-five thousand Turkish elephants!” says socialite Anne Slater, wearing her big blue glasses and grinning up a storm. “He’s magnetic and powerful. I think he’s absolutely, devastatingly attractive.”
“At our dinner for Karl at Schiller’s, firemen had to stand at the door to stop people from coming in because everyone wanted to see him,” says Robert Burke, the recently departed Bergdorf Goodman head of fashion. “Karl said the firemen were the best-dressed people from the whole evening!”
“Karl is a genius!” exclaims Lindsay Lohan, whose name has been lobbed recently as the new face of Chanel (“I prefer Nicole Kidman and that generation at the moment,” Lagerfeld later tells me drily). “I want to have everything that he makes. Everything! I go into stores and grab all his things.”
“Karl is the one person that makes me shy,” says throaty Bungalow 8 owner Amy Sacco. “I think I’ve conquered—I’ve run the gamut on people that I speak to, and very few times have I been shy. But Karl is beyond, and I’m afraid I’d bore him to tears.”
Giorgio Armani, André Leon Talley, Anna Wintour with her pretty daughter, Bee. “A conversation with Karl is not a fashion conversation—it’s a conversation, a conversation that embraces the culture of life,” says Talley. Amanda Cutter Brooks, Celerie Kemble, Anh Duong. “Karl defended me once. He said, ‘Do not forget that Anh is not only a beautiful woman but also an artist!’ ” exclaims Duong. Sophie Dahl, Cecilia Dean, Liv Tyler. “I’m starting to feel a little tired and overwhelmed, and I wonder if I slip out if anyone would notice,” lisps Tyler, with one of her coy half-smiles. An emissary from Planet Not Obsessed With Karl: Chuck Close plants his wheelchair two inches from the exit door. “I’m not very interested in fashion,” says Close, surveying the crowd. He sighs. “This event is making me want to start smoking again.”
But then there he is—Karl! His stiff silver tie glitters like a saber. His black leather gloves are good for murder. He poses for the cameras wearing a ghastly grimace, an entourage of twenty Frenchmen and foxes waiting behind. Guests with fingers curled around champagne glasses jostle to catch a glimpse, not quite crying the way they did in Tokyo last year at the opening of the biggest Chanel store in the world, but certainly eager to be entertained. “I think his hair is powdered, like from the 1800s,” says one socialite. “In fact, it is from the 1800s,” titters her friend. Paparazzi are yelling “Karl!” and bystanders are yelling “Karl!” and peta is yelling “Karl!” the loudest. A dreadlocked white guy with Rollerblades slung over his shoulder streaks down the sidewalk and snarls, “Blood for money, that’s what Karl Lagerfeld wants. Karl is greedy! Karl is evil! Karl is wicked! Karl is . . . the devil!”
Lagerfeld stops in the doorway, puckering his bulbous German lips, which is what he does when he is mad—well, not mad, exactly, but frustrated with other people, who, he has found, are frequently idiots. “You eat meat and wear leather, so shut up,” he says to a German reporter. “I have no time for zis foolishness.”
Lagerfeld is too busy, too smart, and too old to be brought into any foolishness, at least not that which is not of his own making. At 67—or 72, if the 1933 birth date on a baptismal record unearthed by German tabloids is to be believed—he is one of the most professionally self-realized people alive, keeping busy with an incredible twelve or so collections each year, an extensive photography career, a Paris-based bookshop, personal museum-quality furniture collections, the management of six homes, and staying skinny. Lagerfeld lost 90 pounds four years ago on a low-calorie diet—his book on the subject was a best seller in Europe—and has put on ten or so since. The new, skinny Karl is an improved Karl. The creepy fat guy hiding behind a fan has been replaced by a boogying hipster who hangs out with Stephen Gan and Hedi Slimane. “My people are zee cool ones, the rockers,” says Lagerfeld. “I get along with everyone except for men my age, who are bourgeois or retired or boring, and cannot follow the evolution of time and mood.”
As much as Lagerfeld would like to ignore his association with such men—and aging and death in general—his role as a vital elder statesman has much to do with his importance in the world of fashion. He is the King of Fashion, if you will, though he would prefer to be called its eternal Prince. Lagerfeld is the last of the old-world couturiers, with Valentino his only remaining contemporary, and the last of the big high-fashion names, with Yves Saint Laurent in retirement, Tom Ford in transition, and Helmut Lang disappeared. He is also a terrific pop cartoon—a scolding great-uncle, Dave Navarro the elder, the S&M George Washington. His look is an extremely conscious metaphor for his philosophy of fashion and life: Here, watch as I bring together the old, in my tall eighteenth-century collar and bizarre powdered hair, with the new, as seen in my ponytail and $2,500 Agatha leather pants, “the most expensive leather pants in the world,” he declares, with a laugh exactly like Count Chocula’s in its length and ridiculousness. Without the indecipherable French-German accent, he would be made for reality TV, although one would think he’d resist on grounds that philistines should not even be aware that he exists. His iconography grows and grows: first, menacing larger-than-life portraits at H&M then, Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop, where one could buy a pin with his face on it.