A man for all seasons
Justine Picardie mourns the death of a mentor and maestro, while also celebrating this truly remarkable renaissance man
When I first met Karl Lagerfeld, more than two decades ago, I interviewed him at his home in Paris, in one of the grandest houses on Rue de l’Université. I was nervous; for even if he wasn’t as globally famous then, in the 1990s, as he was to become in the era of social media, he was nevertheless known as the Kaiser. Stories abounded of his tendency to arrive late for interviews (though he was always on time completing his acclaimed collections); of his great wit and multilingual talents; and his impatience with those he found boring. His achievements were already legendary, for having mastered the art of couture in the 1950s, at Balmain and Patou, he then revolutionised Chloé, Fendi (where he worked from 1965 onwards) and Chanel. The latter he joined in 1983, 12 years after the death of its founder, Gabrielle Chanel; and by breathing new life into a moribund business, reawakening consumer desire to such a degree that it was swiftly transformed into the most successful fashion brand in the world, Lagerfeld was lauded as a genius.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover a man who was as happy to talk about the poetry of Emily Dickinson as pleats or hemlines; an ardent bibliophile surrounded by a maze of books, arranged in great towers around his desk; a courteous conversationalist, keen to ask questions and to listen to my answers, while dazzling me with his erudition and charm.
Time never seemed to flow in a linear direction with Karl; and not only because he refused to follow a schedule set by others. When we talked, as we often did over the years, his mind would leap from 18thcentury France to 1930s Germany, from Marie Antoinette to Magda Goebbels. His bookshelves reflected the breadth and depth of his enthusiasms: once, when I scanned a tiny fraction of
his immense library, it spanned everything from politics to landscape design, John F Kennedy to Capability Brown; art books that ranged across centuries and genres (from Botticelli to Bonnard; Tibetan mediaeval paintings to ToulouseLautrec); Spinoza, Nietzsche and Colette.
Karl loved books so much that he set up his own Parisian bookshop, 7L, on Rue de Lille; an enterprise that subsequently incorporated publishing. ‘They are a hardbound drug with no danger of an overdose,’ he once observed (and he was a man of restraint in all other areas of his life, avoiding cigarettes, alcohol and drugs). If he was addicted to anything, other than books, it was work. He lived to work, and I sometimes wonder if he worked to live; not in the sense of needing the income, but rather in order to stay alive. His appetite for working – for moving forward, becoming invigorated by new ideas – was prodigious. And yet Karl never saw his ceaseless activities as drudgery; he enjoyed the process of creativity, the act of bringing his sketches alive. Often, he said, his ideas for collections came to him in dreams; hence he slept with paper and pencils by his side, ready to capture the visions that emerged from his subconscious.
Great designers – and Karl was one of the greatest – seem to have an intuitive understanding that fashion should not only exist on the surface of life, but also explore its hidden depths, wherein lie our innermost desires; and that style becomes timeless when it weaves together darkness and light. Karl was always brimming with life, yet never afraid to talk about death. On our first encounter, I was still in mourning for my sister Ruth, who had died of breast cancer in 1997, at the age of 33, and Karl had not yet recovered from the loss of his beloved companion, Jacques de Bascher, whose death from Aids in 1989 had left him utterly bereft. He put on weight in the aftermath, as if adopting a kind of disguise – de Bascher had been a notable dandy, in the Proustian tradition – and shrouded himself in voluminous black outfits. And then all of a sudden, Karl shed the protective outer layers, and emerged again into the spotlight, dressed in the manner for which he became iconic. His signature white powdered ponytail was accessorised with the slender black tailoring of his friend Hedi Slimane; he gave up hiding behind his fan, and instead adopted baroque rings and fingerless black leather gloves. Needless to say, Karl’s trademark crisp white cotton shirts by Hilditch & Key were always perfectly starched; his tiepin gleaming; his boots polished. Dressing sloppily, in his eyes, was a sign of defeat. ‘Don’t dress to kill,’ he declared. ‘Dress to survive.’
If books were Karl’s closest companions, in his later years he unexpectedly fell in love with a cat, a pampered princess named Choupette. And despite his need to spend time alone, he was surrounded by an adoring circle of friends