Up close and personal
A fascinating new documentary opens a window onto the private world of a true fashion original
Words: Clare Press
Sometimes, thanks to fashion’s increasingly broad reach and the almost instantaneous filtering of trends from the catwalks to the streets, it feels as if no-one’s a true original anymore. We are all clones of each other, with our manicures, highlights and Botox, dressed obediently in the uniform of the season. Yawn. But all is not lost-we’ve still got Karl Lagerfeld.
No-one can touch the man creatively either in Fashion Land or beyond. Designer of three labels, photographer and publisher: Lagerfeld wrote the book on prolific. He’s also a sartorial law unto himself: the rings, the baroque style ponytail, the high collars. What makes a man like this tick? Would you love to have him to dinner, or sit next to him on a plane? The next best thing is Rodolphe Marconi’s feature-length documentary, Lagerfeld Confidential. Marconi works and plays with Lagerfeld, follows him on shoots, around town, and he’s getting dressed, and there’s a brilliant scene filmed on a flight from New York.
Ask the director if he’s obsessed with Lagerfeld. And he says: maybe, a little, in a good way. “It sounds strange when you don’t know someone to say you are fascinated [by him]. And of course a psychoanalyst will tell you that’s unhealthy, that in the end you want to kill that person! But seriously, Karl is unique. I’ve been a bit fascinated by him since I was 11.”
Making a film about the maestro proved no easy task, even for a hardened art-house director. Marconi, now 31, won a jury prize at Cannes for his short film Stop back in 1999. It was while promoting his movie Le Dernier Jour [The Last Day] that he got the idea for Lagerfeld Confidential. “An interviewer asked if I was interested in documentary as a medium. I said: ‘If I make a documentary project in France it can be only about Karl.’
Once the seed was sown, Marconi spent months petitioning the Chanel publicity machine. “I called, and they told me, ‘No, it’s not possible.’ So I called back the next day, and the day after that…They told me: ‘100 people want to make a film about Karl, why should we pick you?’ I said I wanted to make a huge film for the cinema. I was quite pretentious!” Three months later, Lagerfeld invited him to lunch.
Marconi then spent to years hanging out with his hero, filming all the time. At the finish, he had so many hours of footage it took him a year to edit it. The result is a wonderfully candid portrait with some surprisingly revealing moments. “We [developed] a certain intimacy. In the end, he spoke about everything,” says Marconi. “I like the moment in the film when we talk about sexuality- he never spoke about that before.”
And now the filming is over, does Marconi still venerate Lagerfeld? “Sometimes I felt him to be harsh with people who made mistakes. And [the way] he can stop collaborating with someone can be harsh, but I think he can get away with it because people respect him. He really is different to how people see him or judge him.
“Sometimes people think Karl must be creating [a] character. In fact that’s not true. He is just like that. He gets up and puts a whole bottle of papaya milk in the bath, and then he dresses so meticulously. When I began the film he was always wearing a ring on his tie. I said to him: ‘Why do you do that? It must be a trend.’ He said: ‘I always do that, [I’ve done it] since I was six years old.’ Later, I found a photo of him as a boy and there was the ring on his tie. This is not some big game; it’s just his life, it’s normal- for him.”
