THE MASTER
Karl Lagerfeld opens up to Justine Picardie about his disciplinarian German mother, his early training as a couturier in 1950s Paris, and why he hates old dresses but welcomes ghosts into his home.
In the two decades since I first met Karl Lagerfeld, he has always refused to be pinned down about the details of his past, or what he might be planning for the future. “I feel no remorse and no regrets,” he declared on one occasion. “I have amnesia when it comes to the past.” On another, he remarked: “The last thing I’d do is define myself. Tomorrow I could be the opposite of what I am today.”
Even so, during those and other encounters, Lagerfeld has always seemed to me to be entirely himself: witty, perceptive, sharp as a knife, yet more often than not, unexpectedly kind. But if he is, as he chooses to be, indefinable, then perhaps the wisest course is to describe him as I find him, on this most recent meeting, which takes place in his creative studio at Chanel, on Rue Cambon. It’s a Friday evening, and the building is unusually quiet, during a brief limbo between two major shows—a beautifully elegiac Autumn/Winter ’18 collection that I’d seen the previous month, and a more lighthearted Cruise presentation, the details of which Karl had been finalising that afternoon.
In all but one respect, he looks exactly the same as always—regal in a high-collared starched white shirt, jet-black jeans, tailored black jacket, freshly powdered white hair—except his monochrome uniform has been softened by a silver beard. It gives him an unexpectedly gentle aspect; so much so, that I have to stop myself reaching out to stroke it. I wonder aloud if his beloved cat Choupette likes her owner having whiskers that are the same colour as her fur. “Yes!” says Karl, delightedly. “The one thing she doesn’t like is when I sleep and I turn my back on her—she gets furious.”
Choupette and Karl sleep together, naturally, as befits a pair of close companions, in a bed of white linen and antique lace. “If she gets hungry, she wakes up first and goes to the kitchen,” he explains, “and if there’s nothing there, she comes back and wakes
me up, by jumping on me. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she wants to play. She runs all over me and her little teeth bite me through the light summer cashmere blanket.” “You’re going to end up looking more and more alike,” I say. “Yes, like an old couple,” he replies, with a smile, showing me pictures of Choupette on his iPhone. “She’s like a sentimental person. She’s very funny—when I’m reading a newspaper, she reads it with me. She eats on the table, too, not on the floor. If the food is on the floor, she won’t touch it. She’s very human ... I sometimes think she’s my mother’s reincarnation.”
Aha, Karl’s mother Elisabeth Bahlmann, an intriguing woman about whom I always want to discover more, particularly given his aversion to discussing his childhood. Today, however, he is a little more forthcoming than usual. The second wife of Otto Lagerfeld—a prosperous German businessman who ran an evaporated-milk company—Elisabeth was clearly a powerful influence on her only son. Karl pronounces her to have been “perfect”, though whenever he has described parenting to me, it sounds utterly terrifying: banging the piano lid on her son’s fingers when he was practising, and ordering him to draw instead, because “it makes less noise”; ridiculing him at every possible opportunity—telling him that his hands were ugly, his nostrils too wide, his hair absurd. Such was her lasting authority that he continues to wear fingerless gloves in public, in order to cover up his offending hands. Yet for all of that, she appears to have had complete confidence in Karl’s ability to take care of himself; and his ensuing self-discipline—he has never smoked or taken drugs or overindulged in alcohol—has served him well, in a long career that has far outlasted that of his fragile contemporary, Yves Saint Laurent, who oscillated between hedonism and depression.
As a teenager, Karl asked his parents if he could leave their home in Germany, and study in Paris instead. “People said to my mother, ‘He will get lost,’ and my mother said, ‘There are people who get lost, and my son is the kind of person who will not be lost.’” She was proved right, when Karl found himself a job as an assistant at the haute couture house of Balmain, having won a prize in a 1954 fashion competition, sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat, with a design for a coat. Saint Laurent was also awarded a prize that same year, and the two boys became friends, as they embarked on their careers.
When I ask Karl what Pierre Balmain was like, he says: “complex, snobbish, not very nice at all—but I loved watching him work”. It was during his apprenticeship that he honed a particular talent for illustration. “I learned in the most boring way in the world—when I was at Balmain, we didn’t have photocopiers, so we had to sketch every dress. One was obliged to work from the day after the collection for three weeks, until two in the morning, sketching everything, because those sketches were sent to the clients. That’s why in my sketches, you can see every technical detail.”
These illustrations continue to underlie all that he produces today, for Fendi, as well as Chanel and his eponymous label—although he describes the latter as “more like a cartoon of me”. Aside from the evidence they offer of his practical expertise, the sketches also possess an evocative sense of life; far more so, I say to him, than is sometimes apparent in an old dress.
“Yes, I hate old dresses,” he replies. “I look at vintage pieces, and think this is the most depressing thing in the world.’” Yet, while he is always looking ahead, he remains an alert translator of the codes of past couturiers, including Gabrielle Chanel herself. When Karl became creative director of Chanel in 1983, the brand had changed very little since the death of its founder in 1971, and was verging on the moribund. His genius was to breathe new life into her iconic creations—the little black dresses, tweed jackets, and pearls, which remain synonymous with Chanel—without being overly reverential. In doing so, he has made the label ever more successful; indeed, when the company released its financial figures in June, for the first time in its 108-year history, they revealed that total annual sales in 2017 were close to USD10 billion—an 11 percent increase from the previous year, and outpacing its rivals.
Although Karl makes his mastery of fashion look effortless, and wears his accomplishment lightly, his training was lengthy and thorough: after three years working for Balmain, he moved to the historic couture house of Jean Patou. “I really learned how to do clothes at Patou, for five years,” he says. “The dressmakers from the 1920s were still working there, and they taught me everything ...” After the meticulous groundwork, he started freelancing for other fashion houses—most notably at Chloé—and then in 1965, began his fruitful collaboration with Fendi, which still continues today. Yet, what seems astonishing to me is not just Karl’s longevity, in an industry that destroys so many designers, but his continuing perfectionism, combined with an intuitive sense of what will be alluring to the quixotic consumers of luxury brands. This goes far beyond sheer professionalism—though he is the consummate professional, who never allows his personal life get in the way of his work. As the years have passed, this work has become ever more central to his life; for aside from Choupette, he appears to love nothing more than designing, sketching, reading, and dreaming, all of which combine to create a series of supremely beguiling collections.
He tells me a story that at first suggests his success might have been an act of fate: “A fortune teller said to me when I was very young, ‘Your story is a strange one. For you, it really starts when it stops for the others.’” But then, immediately afterwards, it is as if his mother’s mocking voice has echoed in his head. “Now I have time to think things over, and I think it’s never good enough, that I’m lazy. But I’m not—I love the job. And I do my job in the best conditions—here at Chanel, and at LVMH [which owns Fendi]. I don’t do meetings, nobody tells me anything, I just explain what I want.” His relationship with Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, is warm and mutually appreciative, while he describes the Wertheimers—Chanel’s long-standing owners—as “like family”. He has also cultivated a tight-knit clan that surrounds him at work: Virginie Viard, the fashion studio director at Chanel who has been at his side for 30 years; Amanda Harlech, who joined Karl as creative consultant in 1996; his personal assistant Sebastien Jondeau, who has looked after him for two decades; and a handful of others, all of them exceptionally loyal. But he is as happy to spend time alone with his vast collection of books, returning to old favourites—including the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the prose of Colette—as well as newer discoveries. “The other day, I found a translation of Rilke by Paul Valéry,” he remarks. “Usually, I don’t believe in translated poetry, but this wasn’t bad.” “It takes a poet to translate another poet,” I suggest. “Exactly,” he replies, “especially one as good as Rilke.” This seems to me to be an appropriate way to understand Karl’s work as a designer; for while he is fluent in the language of Chanel, his work has a poetry of its own, rather than simply being a translation. We discuss the fact that he has had a longer unbroken tenure at Chanel than the great couturière herself; he has spent the past 25 years reinterpreting her legacy, whereas her own career was interrupted by World War II—she launched her business in 1910, closed down the couture house in 1939, and reopened it in 1954.
“I had no problems with Germans during the war, being German myself,’ says Karl, unexpectedly. “I remember the end of the war, but I didn’t suffer from it because I lived on a country estate on the Danish border.” He tells me that his mother was a free thinker, who had introduced him to the work of Hedwig Dohm, a German-Jewish feminist author and intellectual. He also says that his father wanted to keep his family as far away as possible from the Third Reich; while his mother believed that Hitler “was ugly and nothing—she only saw him once, and she said he was very ugly ... Something else I want to talk about is how my mother went to school with Magda Goebbels. They were at finishing school, and for the weekends they were allowed to go to Berlin, and Magda met her first husband [Gunther Quandt] on the train, a very rich man, quite a lot older. And my mother wanted nothing to do with it.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever had a glimpse of Karl’s German childhood, though as always, his conversation refuses to follow a conventional, linear narrative. I mention how much I admired the elegance of his most recent Chanel Métiers d’Art collection, presented last December in his birthplace of Hamburg; and yet the setting he chose was anything but nostalgic, the strikingly modern Elbphilharmonie, a new concert hall designed by the architectural practice of Herzog & de Meuron.
“Some people in Germany said it was like an homage to my mother, but she hated Hamburg,” he says. “She and her sister both had young first husbands, and after were remarried to older men.
My father was 16 years older, while my uncle—who was also my godfather—was 30 years older, and was the most divine person in the world. He’s the only person who slapped my face. Every day, he had a siesta, because he got up very early—he slept for an hour and then he went for a walk. I often used to visit my aunt and uncle during the holidays, and one day, I followed my uncle, and we reached a street called Freiligrath. I was 10 years old and I said, ‘Who was Freiligrath?’ He slapped my face and never spoke to me for the whole walk back to the house. He opened the door and my mother was standing there and he said to her, ‘Elisabeth, your son is an uncultivated as you are.’ And do you know who Freiligrath was? He was the greatest poet of the German revolution of 1848.”
When I express some shock, and say that a child could not possibly be expected to know that, Karl shrugs, then adds: “My uncle lived for 104 years. And his brother lived until he was 106, his sister was 103, and his mother was 102. Those people were born before 1850. My uncle was born in 1868, and died in 1972, and he was never sick. Impeccable.”
Needless to say, Karl seems determined to outlive them all, and to continue working for many years to come. “Do you think your mother is still driving you on?” I ask.
“Maybe,” he replies. “That’s not a bad thing. You know, she would say to me, ‘You look like me, but not as good.’” “Did your mother feel beautiful?” “Yes, she thought she was perfection. She wanted to operate on my nose, because she believed it was ugly. She had navy-blue eyes and ink-black hair. All the Germans were blonde, and she had black hair; she looked like a gypsy at times. Her sister was blonde, my sister was blonde-ish, my half sister [from his father’s first marriage], I don’t remember. I wasn’t brought up with them because they were older, so I never spent much time with them—they were in boarding school. My half-sister married five times—I vaguely recall the first husband, he was great, but I can hardly remember the others.”
His half-sister’s mother, he says, died young, during childbirth; but his father lived into his late 80s. “He was never sick, and he died reading the newspaper.” He pauses, very briefly, and I seize the moment to ask him if we can talk about ghosts. “I love ghosts!” he says. “When I lived at Rue de l'Université there was a ghost in the house of a woman who was killed when she tried to escape during the French Revolution. I never really saw her, but when my mother visited, she did. There was another very good ghost—a man who emerged with a child in a window. He’s had 23 children, apparently. Sometimes he was wearing a powdered wig—très chic.’
And these days, does he live with any ghosts? “I was never so happy as now,” he replies. “I live on Quai Voltaire with Choupette.” “And no more ghosts?” “No, but in the courtyard is another atelier, which was where Ingres painted his famous portrait of Madame Moitessier.” He searches on his iPhone, to show me the picture that the artist completed in 1856, and explains that Picasso was a great admirer of Ingres, and of this picture in particular.
Karl would never dream of comparing his work to art—like Coco Chanel, he believes that fashion is ephemeral, and even if it is distilled into an eternal style, it does not belong in the museum. Even so, it seems that he has come to inhabit an overlapping landscape between fashion and art, a place where one may reflect the other. He would doubtless scoff at such a notion, and yet, in his quest to move onwards, his understanding of the styles and artistic movements of the past continues to shape the way fashion looks today.
Meanwhile, we have been talking for nearly two hours, and his assistant Sebastien has arrived to take him home to Quai Voltaire, where Choupette awaits. As always, Karl gives me the impression that he would be happy for our conversation to continue—which is an indication of his courtesy; and also a good way to leave me wanting more. “Until next time,” he says, kissing me on both cheeks, very lightly.
“I look forward to it,” I say, and it’s true. Even as I wave goodbye, I’m already anticipating a future encounter with the Commander of couture, the Chevalier of chic, the one and only Karl Lagerfeld ...