In the court of Karl
As Karl Lagerfeld makes a rare London appearance times2 Fashion Editor meets a man who calls himself a ‘wh*re’ despite being constant to Chanel for 24 years, a tyrant who commands great loyalty and a couture legend who claims he is not even a great designer
(story and image from timesonline.co.uk)
There is something playfully provocative about a man extolling the virtues of privacy while surrounded by a cabal of at least 20 people. But in one sense, the crowd milling around Karl Lagerfeld today – fitters, seam-stresses, models, make-up artists, muses, directrices and PRs – are so much a part of his existence that they may have become a kind of animated wallpaper.
We are in the Chanel salon in Paris while he overseesParis-Londres, a collection he is bringing to London’s catwalks tomorrow evening on one of his rare visits, to celebrate the house’s collaboration with French artisans. While most would find the onlookers intrusive, he appears barely to notice them – or rather, to view their low murmuring as a kind of reassuring static. That, of course, would question his claim to crave privacy – a contradiction he would appreciate, since he enjoys nothing better than wrapping himself in riddles.
Or perhaps he views the wallpaper as family. Apart from a battalion of godchildren whom, in the main, he finds “disappointing”, he has no blood ties to speak of. This doesn’t seem to trouble him unduly since you can’t choose your relatives, whereas you can hand-pick your staff. And the Chanel tribe is as loyal as soldiers, somewhat undermining the popular notion of Lagerfeld as a tyrant.
Predictably, he likes the notion of despot, indeed, has fostered it, adopting a uniform of white shirt (he has more than 1,000, mostly from Hilditch & Key), drainpipe trousers, frock coat, white ponytail, omnipresent sunglasses and a carapace of rings (he has hundreds) that garland his knuckles like armour. What he dislikes about going to Germany, which he does as rarely as he visits Britain, is the Teutonic habit of calling him Karli, or Karlchen. Anyone would think he preferred his more common nickname of Kaiser Karl.
The Kaiser persona is so recognisable that it has become a Hallowe’en staple in New York; recently Roberto Cavalli attended a party in Lagerfeld fancy dress. “An act of courage, no?” retorts Lagerfeld. “His silhouette is a little . . . just say I think I look better.” Since his dramatic weight loss seven years ago (he says that he keeps in shape by foxtrotting with Oscar de la Renta), The Look can border on the demonic or, on milder days, on the vestments of a malevolent Dickensian priest – “defrocked” as he puts it with relish.
It’s a witty if disconcerting construct, not only because his mother Elizabeth, a lapsed Protestant who had been told by a fortune-teller that her son would become a bishop, promptly forbade him from stepping inside a church when he was growing up, but because there is a touch of the religious aesthete about his abstemiousness.
In the 1970s, when the rest of Paris wallowed in an orgy of drugs and, well, orgies, the strikingly attractive Lagerfeld preferred to retire at the end of an evening with a good book (one legend puts his collection at 500,000). There was his great love, Jacques de Bascher, but after de Bascher died in 1989, there followed an apparent withdrawal from emotional commitment.
His chief rival at that time, Yves Saint Laurent (who came third in a competition to design a coat, behind Lagerfeld), was at the centre of a cultural Zeitgeist while Lagerfeld remained the outsider. “My choice,” he says. “I was not born to be wild. He [Saint Laurent] was the opposite of what one should do. He was a genius ruined by his entourage.” Hmm.
There was never any danger of Lagerfeld going over the edge. He preferred to watch others perform that manoeuvre. From this vicariousness, perhaps, came his passion for photography. “Guilty? No, I didn’t make them. I couldn’t stop them.” So no self-destruction for him.
He says he doesn’t have an entourage. Yet what are these 20 attendants, hanging on his every word – a latterday composite of a royal court from his favourite period, the 18th century? They have been waiting all day for him and now that, at 5pm, he has finally arrived, they will be hanging on a lot longer.“But it’s not like Armani, with his boyfriend. It’s not like Valentino with his, or Yves with Pierre [Berg鬠Saint Laurent’s lover andSvengali]. I never wanted my business partner to be my boyfriend. I never wanted to be surrounded by sycophants. That’s why my career is completely different from theirs. You could say that I’m a terrible underachiever. My mother always said it was a good thing that I went into fashion because it proved I didn’t have any great expectations of myself, and she was right. I haven’t made an empire with my name on it. I don’t go around calling myself an artist. If anything,” he breaks off, amused by the conceit, “I’m a wh*re. I go wherever they pay me.”
Actually, for a wh*re, he’s remarkably constant. He has been with Chanel for 24 years and with Fendi for 40, which places him directly under the rule of two of the most powerful and reclusive businessmen in the world – Alain Wertheimer, the owner of Chanel, and Bernard Arnaud, the CEO of LVMH, which now owns Fendi.
As Karl Lagerfeld makes a rare London appearance times2 Fashion Editor meets a man who calls himself a ‘wh*re’ despite being constant to Chanel for 24 years, a tyrant who commands great loyalty and a couture legend who claims he is not even a great designer
(story and image from timesonline.co.uk)
There is something playfully provocative about a man extolling the virtues of privacy while surrounded by a cabal of at least 20 people. But in one sense, the crowd milling around Karl Lagerfeld today – fitters, seam-stresses, models, make-up artists, muses, directrices and PRs – are so much a part of his existence that they may have become a kind of animated wallpaper.
We are in the Chanel salon in Paris while he overseesParis-Londres, a collection he is bringing to London’s catwalks tomorrow evening on one of his rare visits, to celebrate the house’s collaboration with French artisans. While most would find the onlookers intrusive, he appears barely to notice them – or rather, to view their low murmuring as a kind of reassuring static. That, of course, would question his claim to crave privacy – a contradiction he would appreciate, since he enjoys nothing better than wrapping himself in riddles.
Or perhaps he views the wallpaper as family. Apart from a battalion of godchildren whom, in the main, he finds “disappointing”, he has no blood ties to speak of. This doesn’t seem to trouble him unduly since you can’t choose your relatives, whereas you can hand-pick your staff. And the Chanel tribe is as loyal as soldiers, somewhat undermining the popular notion of Lagerfeld as a tyrant.
Predictably, he likes the notion of despot, indeed, has fostered it, adopting a uniform of white shirt (he has more than 1,000, mostly from Hilditch & Key), drainpipe trousers, frock coat, white ponytail, omnipresent sunglasses and a carapace of rings (he has hundreds) that garland his knuckles like armour. What he dislikes about going to Germany, which he does as rarely as he visits Britain, is the Teutonic habit of calling him Karli, or Karlchen. Anyone would think he preferred his more common nickname of Kaiser Karl.
The Kaiser persona is so recognisable that it has become a Hallowe’en staple in New York; recently Roberto Cavalli attended a party in Lagerfeld fancy dress. “An act of courage, no?” retorts Lagerfeld. “His silhouette is a little . . . just say I think I look better.” Since his dramatic weight loss seven years ago (he says that he keeps in shape by foxtrotting with Oscar de la Renta), The Look can border on the demonic or, on milder days, on the vestments of a malevolent Dickensian priest – “defrocked” as he puts it with relish.
It’s a witty if disconcerting construct, not only because his mother Elizabeth, a lapsed Protestant who had been told by a fortune-teller that her son would become a bishop, promptly forbade him from stepping inside a church when he was growing up, but because there is a touch of the religious aesthete about his abstemiousness.
In the 1970s, when the rest of Paris wallowed in an orgy of drugs and, well, orgies, the strikingly attractive Lagerfeld preferred to retire at the end of an evening with a good book (one legend puts his collection at 500,000). There was his great love, Jacques de Bascher, but after de Bascher died in 1989, there followed an apparent withdrawal from emotional commitment.
His chief rival at that time, Yves Saint Laurent (who came third in a competition to design a coat, behind Lagerfeld), was at the centre of a cultural Zeitgeist while Lagerfeld remained the outsider. “My choice,” he says. “I was not born to be wild. He [Saint Laurent] was the opposite of what one should do. He was a genius ruined by his entourage.” Hmm.
There was never any danger of Lagerfeld going over the edge. He preferred to watch others perform that manoeuvre. From this vicariousness, perhaps, came his passion for photography. “Guilty? No, I didn’t make them. I couldn’t stop them.” So no self-destruction for him.
He says he doesn’t have an entourage. Yet what are these 20 attendants, hanging on his every word – a latterday composite of a royal court from his favourite period, the 18th century? They have been waiting all day for him and now that, at 5pm, he has finally arrived, they will be hanging on a lot longer.“But it’s not like Armani, with his boyfriend. It’s not like Valentino with his, or Yves with Pierre [Berg鬠Saint Laurent’s lover andSvengali]. I never wanted my business partner to be my boyfriend. I never wanted to be surrounded by sycophants. That’s why my career is completely different from theirs. You could say that I’m a terrible underachiever. My mother always said it was a good thing that I went into fashion because it proved I didn’t have any great expectations of myself, and she was right. I haven’t made an empire with my name on it. I don’t go around calling myself an artist. If anything,” he breaks off, amused by the conceit, “I’m a wh*re. I go wherever they pay me.”
Actually, for a wh*re, he’s remarkably constant. He has been with Chanel for 24 years and with Fendi for 40, which places him directly under the rule of two of the most powerful and reclusive businessmen in the world – Alain Wertheimer, the owner of Chanel, and Bernard Arnaud, the CEO of LVMH, which now owns Fendi.
I wish I was part of his entourage...I could replace Amanda Harlech. I have better taste, at least. 
