Think Karl only dressed the stars? No, we ALL wear his clothes
Feminine, glamorous... and copied across the High Street, Lagerfeld’s influence was immense, says Diana’s favourite designer
THE shoes of such a fashion icon, someone who has been as culturally and creatively significant as Karl Lagerfeld, will not be easy ones to fill.
He created a contemporary take on glamour: glamorous clothes to be worn by special people on special occasions.
And he quickly proved that he was very good at what he did.
Karl held the tenets of Coco Chanel’s original ideas for feminine, relaxed, simple, soft fashion, while at the same time going off-piste with his exciting, modern designs which were always new, always thought-provoking.
Coco had so many emblems — like the interlocking Cs, the quilted bags, the perfumes No5 and No19 — which could all be used ad nauseam, and Karl did use them, with great skill.
He wasn’t afraid to experiment, or to be excessive, both in his presentations and the final cost of the garments. Celebrities couldn’t get enough of his look.
The cost of putting on an haute couture fashion show for Chanel is likely to be between half a million and a million euro, and Karl did it with such flair, confidence and sure-handedness, season after season. People in the business hugely admired him for still doing this well into his 80s.
You may not realise it but we all wear Lagerfeld’s designs. They may have been picked up on the High Street rather than in a Chanel boutique, but so many of the clothes we buy were inspired by him. He created the styles that we now see as wardrobe staples, such as the feminine tweed suit.
He never lost touch with youth culture, either, managing to stay relevant in a notoriously fickle industry.
His ready-to-wear catwalk shows were often even more memorable than the designs themselves. Show after show, he never disappointed, transforming Paris’s Grand Palais into an ultraglamorous airport hangar or a fully functioning grocery store with shopping trolleys and fresh food.
He could put on a spectacle like no one else ever has, or possibly will again.
I’m also supremely grateful to him for paving the way for other designers, like myself, to collaborate with High Street chains after becoming the first to do that, with his H&M collection, back in 2004. It was an incredibly brave first step.
Because of him, I have clients who were happy to buy both my couture collection and the range I had at John Lewis — something that would never have happened 20 years ago. One encounter that stands out in my memory was in the 1980s when we were both invited to a dinner at Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair, London, hosted by a group of high-profile fashion journalists.
By then, Karl had made his career-defining move to become creative director at Chanel, while I was no longer a designer looking for his big break but known as ‘the man who dressed Princess Diana’. We were seated beside one another, and we both agreed that we weren’t quite sure why we were there — something we felt was a bit of a hoot.
After asking my age — I was in my 30s at the time — Karl informed me that he was just 14 years my senior. In fact, as I discovered only while reading the coverage of his passing, he was born in 1933 — which makes him 17 years older than me.
Of course, he wasn’t the first person in the fashion industry to shave off a few years, but it did bring a smile to my face.