LAGERFELD: KAISER OF THE CATWALK
Genius who bestrode the fashion world with a monstrous ego and an acid tongue
FROM the powdered white hair swept into a flamboyant ponytail, to the towering stiff collars, the fingerless black gloves, the diamondencrusted belts and the paper fans he carried to waft away unpleasant odours, everything about Karl Lagerfeld was different.
The monstrous ego and acid asides, as well as a misleading narrative about his past, were the ingredients of a subtle subterfuge.
They all served as a shield to deflect the curious away from the truth about the man behind the ever-present dark glasses who, for more than six decades, bestrode the world of haute couture.
His death at 85 from pancreatic cancer robs fashion of that last link with the fabulous designers who emerged on the coat tails of Christian Dior after World War II.
As creative director for Chanel, where he spent 36 years, Lagerfeld was arguably the greatest of them all.
Certainly, he was the richest, with a fortune of about £100 million (a R1.837 billion). He had many homes, including a nine-bedroom flat on the Left Bank in Paris, a house in Vermont, one in Biarritz that had 5km of bookshelves and a mansion in Monaco where he had one bathroom for the morning and another for the evening.
Paying tribute, Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, wrote on Twitter: “The world lost a giant among men. Karl was brilliant, wicked, funny, generous beyond measure and deeply kind.”
He became as famous for his sharp tongue as his reinterpretation of the famous little black dress.
Princess Diana, he once observed, was “sweet but stupid”, but however unpleasant and toxic his remarks, he remained impervious because of his brilliance at understanding fashion and giving women what they wanted. As the company’s fortunes grew, Lagerfeld became known for the lavish sets he wanted for his six Chanel collections each year.
One year, there was a rocket ship, another a reproduction of the Eiffel Tower and, for the autumn 2010 show, he imported a giant iceberg from Scandinavia.
His muses included models Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne, but his most famous collaborator was Ines de la Fressange, who oozed the kind of chic beloved of Chanel’s clients.
She played a major part in reviving the fortunes of the fashion house, but five years into their partnership she was fired because she he had been chosen to be the new Marianne, the girl who was the symbol of the French republic for the then-bicentennial.
”It was a great compliment,” she said. “I had telegrams from all over, but not from Lagerfeld. Then I had a letter saying terrible things: what I’d done was ‘bourgeois, common and provincial’. He was revolted and said we could not continue working.”
Provincial’ was a word that dropped often from his lips. He even used to describe his great rival, Yves St Laurent: “He is very middle-of-theroad French... very provincial.”
Such criticism may have served to disguise not just their rivalry in fashion, but also in love. Their real competition was over Jacques de Bascher, a decadent dandy wellknown in Paris high society – in particular for his debauched parties and whose beauty Lagerfeld likened to a young Greta Garbo.
Born in Hamburg in 1933, Lagerfeld’s rise was irrepressible. By 21 he was dressing movie stars and by 1964, he was in Paris designing for Chloe. The next year, he began his lifelong association with Fendi, but it was his move to Chanel in 1983 that cemented his place as Kaiser Karl of world fashion.
He liked his models to glide, not walk, on the runway. There were the gimmicks, too: he dressed women in Y-fronts. An early collection entitled, “Shaped to be raped” caused outrage. He was unmoved. “Fashion without wit is disastrous,” he loftily declared.
When Pierre Cardin announced he was banning photographers from his presentation at the Paris Couture Collection to protect his gowns from being copied, Lagerfeld icily observed: “It’s like a woman with no lovers asking for the pill.”
Some of his comments were immortalised in a 2013 book, The
World According To Karl, in which he offended the whole of Russia: “If I was a woman in Russia I would be a lesbian, as the men are very ugly.”
Of his own look, he said that he wore a ponytail because his hair was curly and he wanted it straighter. He powdered it white to hide the grey.
As for his omnipresent dark glasses, he said: “People look better through tinted glass.”
Two issues remain: who will replace him at Chanel, and what will happen to his only companion, a white Burmese cat called Choupette? Some years ago, Lagerfeld said the pet had been written into his will. It could make her the world’s richest feline.