Hamish Bowles Remembers the Unparalleled Energy, Wicked Wit, and Insatiable Curiosity of Karl Lagerfeld
As a very little boy, Lagerfeld was annoying his unforgiving mother so much with his clumsy piano practice that she slammed the piano lid down on his infant fingers and firmly told him, “Enough piano! Now, you draw.”
We must be thankful for Frau Lagerfeld’s tough love because Karl never stopped drawing from that day forth. As a teenager he sketched his way into a prize at the International Wool Secretariat (where he met his fellow winner, the coltish Yves Saint Laurent) with a chic design for a shoulder-belted barrel coat that landed him a job with the couturier Pierre Balmain, known for his becoming Jolie Madame fashions. Postwar Paris, as Lagerfeld told me, was “dark, not very clean—everything looked different then,” but nevertheless it was the beginning of an enduring love affair, even though he briskly claimed that at chez Balmain he learned everything that a designer should not do. Soon after, still a remarkably young man, he was appointed designer at Jean Patou, a dusty house long past its Jazz Age prime where he was bored out of his mind designing two collections a year but learned sophisticated 1920s dressmaking techniques from the elderly fitters and seamstresses in the ateliers that would inform his designs for seven decades. Disillusioned with the world of the haute couture, he left for Rome to study his favorite composer Bellini. However, he realized that he was “a fashion junkie” at heart, and with the uncanny intuition that remained a true friend for the rest of his life, understood that fashion wasn’t about making garden party frocks for debutantes and their mothers, but that the future was in the emerging ready-to-wear design houses that would be eager for dynamic young talent. He decided to present himself as a gun for hire, taking his talents from one house to another and picking up a fistful of salaries that grew handsomer and handsomer with every passing year.
He worked for Loewe in Madrid and a slew of Italian labels (at Tiziani in Rome he created the explosive headdress and caftan worn by Elizabeth Taylor to portray the richest woman in the world in the ill-fated 1968 movie,
Boom!), but his destiny changed when he met Gaby Aghion of Chloé in 1964. Here he made ready-to-wear clothes as covetable as haute couture, moving voraciously from trend to trend with Pop Art embroideries one minute, dainty clothes inset with panels of lace that seemed to have stepped from the pages of the
Gazette du Bon Ton the next, followed by bold-shouldered Memphis-inspired looks, always riding the crest of the fashionable wave. Karl molded Chloé’s image so successfully that a decade later he entered into a partnership agreement with Aghion. (“In this business I like two things,” he told
Vogue, “the work and the money.”) For the ruthlessly unsentimental Karl, timeless fashion was a bore, and although he worshipped the past, he had no nostalgia in him; in fact, he was voracious in his quest for novelty and newness.
No sooner had he sent a collection down the runway than he had consigned it to oblivion and was pursuing the next big thing, the next trend, the next It girl. “Things are done for the joy of doing it,” he told
Vogue in 1995. “Tomorrow, I begin again.”
In 1965 he met the quintet of formidable Fendi sisters, whose grandparents Adele and Edoardo had founded an under-the-radar luxury fur house in 1925, and he triumphantly reinvented their family brand too. He treated fur to innovative designs and treatments, and not only conceived the linked F logo that would define the Fendi brand but cannily registered the design before he showed it to the enthusiastic sisters, who apparently rewarded him with an apartment in the Eternal City. (“I love Italy and I love Italians,” he said.)
By 1979,
Vogue described “a personal lifestyle that’s as much that of a royal courtier as of a couturier,” but Lagerfeld demurred. “I’m working-class,” he always insisted.
The work amplified in 1983, when Alain Wertheimer hired Lagerfeld to revamp Chanel and he embarked on an enduring Postmodern transformation there too. (“When I came to Chanel, I said to Mr. Wertheimer, ‘Let’s make a pact,’ like Faust with the devil. But we don’t know who is the devil and who is Faust.”)
All this work had made him a very rich man, indeed, and for decades Lagerfeld was free to indulge his passions for houses and the things to fill them. “I think it is healthy to decorate, to destroy, to do and redo,” he said.
By the turn of the ’90s Karl owned seven houses in four countries, furnished with museum-quality antiques, state-of-the-art contemporary commissions, and a quarter of a million books. “I’m a very messy person with all my books, letters, writing” he said. His homes were filled with objects but not with people. “I realized at 14 that I was born to live alone,” he said. “I live in a set with the curtains of the stage closed and with no audience.” Latterly he lived with his beloved cat, Choupette, surrounded by the tools of his work and food for his febrile mind.
I was 20 when I went to my first Karl Lagerfeld show. The designer was already a world-class fashion star and had just begun his sly, seductively Postmodern reinvention of the codes of Chanel—a house that had languished in staid propriety in the dozen or so years since its eponymous founder had died.
The couture show was unveiled at the Opera Garnier; there were tightrope walkers, doves, circus magic, and the launch of the fragrance Coco. At least that’s what a breathless Suzy Menkes told me afterward as I wept on the steps: The defenders at the gate wouldn’t let my 20-year-old self through the door, although I had spent days proffering my credentials as the barely-out-of-my teens Paris and London editor of Australian
Harper’s Bazaar, and who indeed can blame them? The gorgons finally relented, however, and I was allowed into the salon on the rue Cambon where chic clients saw the same collection in the time-honored fashion of the haute couture houses—quietly so that they could study the clothes up close and place their personal orders. A beige screen crashed to the floor in the middle of the show, but there was a lot more fashion excitement in the clothes themselves that took the codes of La Grande Mademoiselle and subverted them with wicked wit. The Lesage embroideries were crusted on, and I was amazed to discover that the carefully seamed suits were garlanded with “gilded lavatory chain links.”
At the Lagerfeld show the following ready-to-wear season I was still enough of a fashion neophyte to ask Karl to autograph his portrait in the run of show program, and I am glad I did. “For Hemish,” he wrote, and I cherish it to this day.
Karl’s energy was unparalleled. He would retreat to one of his country houses for the weekend and return with 200 costume designs for an opera or ballet. He would wake up from a vivid dream and design a collection based on it that very morning, or conjure one on the most esoteric things that had tickled his fancy. He might, for instance, be inspired by the colors in Jawlensky’s oft-repeated reductive face portraits or (as he was for
his final Chanel haute couture collection shown this January) by an exhibition of the master purveyors of luxury goods to the 18th-century French courts that he had sleuthed in a little-trafficked museum in the heart of the Marais. And it never ended; almost unique among creative directors for major international brands today, Karl produced almost every sketch, controlled every fitting. “For Chanel alone I do 10 collections, and I do it all myself, all the sketches,” he said pointedly, “I’m not the ‘art director,’ with 25 people working on computer.”
I had a sense of Karl’s crazy schedule as early as 1989 when he was commissioned by London’s
Sunday Times Magazine to photograph a series of contemporary dandies, and, to my great delight, the fashion editor Caroline Baker invited me to sit for him as part of the portfolio. The sitting was to take place at Le Mée near Fontainebleau, the exquisite 18th-century house that Karl had decorated with a thoroughly modish mash-up of Gustavian, Martine School, and 1940s furniture. The
Times equipe was ferried into the depths of the French countryside. At the time, Karl was in the thrall of the madcap Princesse Diane de Beauvau-Craon, who was the establishment’s de facto hostess. (As a rebellious debutante, she had been furious when her mother ordered a couture dress for her coming-out ball from Marc Bohan at Dior, a froth of pale pink Lady Diana organza. The princess shaved her head on the eve of the ball so that at least she could wear it with punk attitude—just the sort of gesture that Karl would have applauded.)
Karl swept in hours later and we sat down to a sumptuous midnight meal that Baker realized weeks after the fact represented the better part of her annual fashion budget. By two in the morning Karl was more or less ready for the séance. My hair was given Marcel waves and my cheeks powdered and lightly rouged so that I looked like Stephen Tennant, the aesthete aristocrat of Britain’s Jazz Age, a reference that both Karl and I relished. (One of my hapless friends on the shoot got an Otto Dix makeover with Lynn Yaeger-esque whorls of deep pink cresting his cheekbones, so I considered myself very lucky.) Karl approved the Nehru-collar jacket that the London tailor Richard James had made, of deep sky blue raw silk embroidered with soft pink cabbage roses, and dug out a vast pink silk flower and photographed me apparently breathing in its heady fragrance, lost in transports of ecstasy, the very embodiment of camp. We weren’t back in Paris until dawn but I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
The astonishing thing is that the protean Karl kept up this relentless schedule more or less up until the weeks before he died. Night after night after night, for decades on decades, he operated on almost no sleep—often having dreamed vividly of clothes that would materialize in the next collection. The financial rewards of all his hard work went towards more lovely houses and breathtaking wonders to fill them with.
By the time I was invited to visit the astonishing Hôtel de Soyecourt in the heart of the Left Bank in the early ’90s it was filled with 18th-century furniture, pictures, and objets d’art of princely quality that lived up to their setting. The house had been built in around 1706 by Lassurance—a little known architect whose praises Karl was delighted to have read in the letters of Liselotte, Madame Palatine, the long-suffering wife of Louis XIV’s flamboyantly queer brother, the Duke of Orléans, known as Monsieur. The outspoken Liselotte—like the tragic Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, and known as the Winter Queen—was one of history’s esoteric fascinators who bewitched Karl: his erudition was a constant astonishment.
Karl had already graduated to the building’s magnificent principal block from an only faintly less magnificent set of rooms in an adjoining wing. The drawing room was filled with broad-seated giltwood chairs signed by the great makers, such as Tilliard, Dalanois, and Bauve, and upholstered in sharp yellow silk damask and raspberry pink stamped velvet, a curious scheme nabbed I believe from the painting on a snuffbox belonging to the Comte d’Artois. Karl did not believe in the poetry of patina: Whenever the sun streaked the acres of silk faille shades that ballooned at the tall windows, he swiftly replaced them. But this was no museum. Karl used his beautiful, precious things as they had been used by the aristocrats and crowned heads who had originally commissioned them, and the world’s preeminent supermodels and superstars of the moment would loll on the spindly arms of those chairs and scrape their vermeil cutlery on the hand-painted blossoms of the Sèvres porcelain with giddy abandon.
Dinners chez Karl in those pre-diet days were Proustian affairs: He served French food prepared and presented to a Belle Époque level of elaboration, and the women came in bedazzled couture. During one unforgettable soiree, he rolled up the Savonnerie carpet—it had, after all, been commissioned for the Salon de la Paix at Versailles—to reveal the beeswax gleam of the parquet
de Hongrie beneath and danced a spirited tango with the very nimble-footed Oscar de la Renta, who I seem to recall had a rose in his mouth. Was this the night that Karl’s great friend Princess Caroline of Monaco stood on the stairs, each tread lit with a scented candle, and started reciting Coleridge, perfect to the word?
Upstairs in this marvelous house, Karl subsequently created a sitting room filled with plump 19th-century upholstered furnishings (based on a set that had belonged to Wagner) that he covered in a surprising marmalade-color velvet. Under the window was a bronze by Falconet that had once belonged to Catherine the Great. He gave me a tour and I discovered that his nearby bathroom was a visual palette cleanser with the look of a 1930s moderne sanitorium. It was hung with the most exquisite studies by the Art Deco fashion illustrator Georges Lepape, including one of a wasp-waisted dandy that I had loved since childhood and was astonished to discover there. Karl was gleeful that I recognized it. God, it was so fun sparring with someone who had such encyclopedic style references.
In the grand courtyard-facing gallery upstairs Karl installed a vast table that stretched almost the entire length of the room. He heaped it with books, more and more and more and more to fuel his voracious appetites for literature and visual stimulation, until eventually the table shot right through the 18th-century floor and the ceiling beams and into the entrance hall below.
Then, on a whim, he sold his superb 18th-century treasures—just as he had shaken off his museum-quality Art Deco treasures and his Memphis Group wonders—and commissioned state-of-the-art objects and furnishings from the coolest designers of the day instead. He tired of these, too, and left that amazing house to move to a platinum gray spaceship of an apartment spangled with light that bounced off the Seine. He was just as unsentimental and ruthless with his friends. When his intimate pal Anna Piaggi published a book filled with the wonderful portraits of her in her ever-changing
tenues that he had sketched for her through the decades, a distinct froideur set in to their relationship. When Inès de la Fressange, the witty, willowy muse who had helped him define a playfully patrician elegance for Chanel, was elected to represent La Marianne, the symbol of France, he declared her irredeemably bourgeoise and banished her from his inner circle, promoting the giggly, jewelry-designing Victoire de Castellane, the
pulpeuse niece of his longtime Chanel right hand, Gilles Dufour, instead, and ushering in a new era of saucy vinyl and plastic that seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. Inès was eventually invited back, but real enemies were not so lucky. Karl famously feuded with Kitty d’Alessio, for instance, the president of Chanel in America, when he first arrived to reinvent the brand. Her tenure did not outlast his displeasure. “The good news is that Kitty d’Alessio has been made director of special projects,” he announced gleefully, snapping his fan shut. “The bad news is there are no special projects.”
Karl always had the eye for the girl of the hour. One moment it was the fabulous cognac-eyed Marpessa, who swung and flirted her way down his runways. The next it was an astonishingly pretty Claudia Schiffer, who in those early days couldn’t walk down a runway to save her life (and had to have special low-heeled shoes made for her outfits) but bounced along in her dimpled blonde magnificence brimming with joie de vivre and igniting the photographers into a frenzy of wolf whistles.
The quest for novelty and newness never left him—although for years it must be admitted that he communicated only by fax, his florid hand so much more expressive than a generic email or text’s font.
The last time that I really spent time with Karl he was conducting the fittings for his
Fall 2018 haute couture collection behind a desk heaped with papers and trays of costume jewelry. He had recently discovered a
verre églomisé silhouette portrait of Gabrielle Chanel painted on mirror by the modish antebellum artist Etienne Drian, whom I happen to worship, and he mischievously placed his own ’70s bronze portrait bust by Claude Lalanne beneath—two gutsy profiles, two endlessly fascinating and compelling and controversial characters who changed the way women wanted to look. Karl’s hearing was faltering and he kept up a machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of conversation to stall interrupting questions that he might not understand clearly, leaping from fashion to music to literature to technology to politics to industry gossip to a little of his own history (this last only with strident prompting from me), in easy bounds, leavening his chat with the outrageously politically incorrect provocations that he delivered like the Marquise de Merteuil in
Dangerous Liaisons.
And still he didn’t slow down. One minute he was costuming a ballet for the gala opening night of the season at the Opera Garnier and dressing its chic director, Aurélie Dupont, in black chiffon onstage and Chanel’s black satin panniers and Toulouse-Lautrec ankle boots off; the next, he came to New York to show his Egyptian-inspired
Métiers d’Art collection for Chanel in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Then it was on to the
Spring 2019 haute couture, unveiled in an ersatz Italianate garden constructed under the dome of the Grand Palais, one among so many astonishing environments whipped up in the alchemical centrifuge of Karl’s brain. The clothes—inspired by that exhibition of 18th-century
fournisseurs—were enchanting enough, with dresses crusted with what looked like hand-painted Meissen porcelain flowers or scattered with blossoms made from feathers, but there was something inexplicably solemn in the atmosphere. And then Karl did not appear to take his customary bow, and suddenly all the air was sucked out of the room.
It seems impossible to imagine that he will not take that bow any more, will not continue to surprise and astonish us with his wicked wit, his insatiable curiosity, and his protean imagination, but perhaps we can take solace by doing what he never did himself—look back, in wonder and in awe, at his unmatched and unmatchable body of work.
I really appreciated his attitude... and respected him even more after that!
