The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Farewell, fashion maverick
Sasha Slater on encounters with Karl Lagerfeld, fashion’s eccentric, outspoken genius, and the legacy he leaves behind
Outspoken, quick-witted and quite brilliant, Karl Lagerfeld revolutionised Chanel, Fendi and everything else he touched. Here, Sasha Slater pays tribute to the oneof-a-kind designer, while Bethan Holt recalls the most ground-breaking moments in his 65-year career
FOR THE CHANEL COUTURE show at Paris’s Grand Palais in January, Karl Lagerfeld had a Mediterranean garden specially created. But as the show ended, he failed to appear from behind the scenes as he usually would. Virginie Viard, his closest collaborator, emerged instead, holding hands with the ‘bride’ who’d just paced the catwalk in a crystal-encrusted swimsuit and trailing veil. A short time later, a tannoy announcement stopped us all in our tracks as we were pouring out
of the exhibition space. Monsieur Lagerfeld, it said, was not at this presentation: ‘He is tired.’ He would be at the second show at midday, which was the more starry of the two (we journalists had seen the earlier one so we could meet our deadlines). But at the end of the second show he didn’t take his farewell bow either. Maybe he had flu, we hoped. It was a freezing, sleety January day: who could expect an 85-year-old to venture out in that? Even an octogenarian as extraordinary as he was.
As it turns out, our last view of him – and his last appearance on a catwalk – had been in New York’s Metropolitan Museum in December, when he took a bow in front of the 10 BC Temple of Dendur. He’d staged a show in which Ancient Egypt somehow met, clashed and mated with 1980s Manhattan. Pharrell Williams and Kaia Gerber walked the runway in a joyful explosion of gold, scarab beetles, iridescent blue and giant jewelled breastplates. Pleasingly eternal and yet bang up to date. Just like the man himself, we thought.
In public, Lagerfeld was enigmatic – hidden behind dark glasses, his hands tucked inside fingerless gloves (his fearsome bourgeoise mother told him his hands were ‘not that beautiful’ when he was young, and it stayed with him), and surrounded by hordes of advisors and colleagues. One-to-one, though, or with a small group, he was funny, witty, dry and a terrible tease. Even transcribing the recording of an encounter with him took approximately three times as long as it should because he talked so fast, often in a mix of English, French and Italian. And every word was so sparkling or so silly, often including some completely random reference – a Lily Allen lyric, say, or the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio – that you didn’t want to miss a thing, though you couldn’t help doing so. ‘He’s just a well of knowledge,’ the actor Kristen Stewart, chosen as one of Chanel’s many ambassadors, once told me. And if he talked fast, you had to think faster. I remember coming out of encounters with him exhausted, my heart beating madly and my palms sweaty.
Writing up such an interview was also a nightmare, because every single thing he said was so quotable you didn’t know when to stop. Keeping to a word count was a real challenge. He looked very, very grand, but he didn’t sound it. He kept his flowing ponytail dyed white, he said, because if he didn’t ‘it was the colour of pee-pee’. Looking critically at a couture gown with little trails of pink and mint-green feathers floating below the hem, he ordered his ‘petites mains’, the seamstresses in his peerless ateliers, to have another go (‘It looks like an old man’s bottom’). One of my colleagues, commenting on his monochrome uniform of white Hilditch & Key shirts cut with a huge rounded collar practically up to the earlobe, and black suits from designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Hedi Slimane, told him he looked like a priest. ‘You know some funny priests,’ he retorted sharply.
Lagerfeld loathed talking about the past, which was frustrating for us journalists because his past was peppered with the most fascinating actors, designers and writers of the last 60 years. We will never, for instance, get to the bottom of his rivalry with Yves Saint Laurent.
He never looked back on any collection as a success, because he was always thinking of the next show, the next deadline, the next idea. He slept alone, he told me, apart from Choupette, his beloved Birman cat who is, so they say, one of the heirs to his £150 million fortune. And when he woke, whatever time it was, he would sketch. He sketched incessantly, drawing pictures of new collections for Chanel and Fendi through the night, which the experts in his ateliers would then translate into clothes. He drew passers-by in the streets outside his Rive Gauche home, or impressions of Coco Chanel, whose image he did so much to champion. And portraits of friends,
One of my colleagues commented that Lagerfeld’s monochrome uniform made him look like a priest. ‘You know some funny priests,’ he retorted sharply
including the five lively and quarrelsome Roman Fendi sisters. Originally a family-owned bourgeois fur house, in 1965 Fendi asked Lagerfeld to become their creative director – probably the best hiring in fashion history. Fendi is now an Lvmhowned superbrand, thanks largely to Lagerfeld’s talent and energy.
Lagerfeld would get ideas from anywhere, he told me once, ‘and most of them go in the bin’. He mimed ripping up a drawing and chucking it away. But, for instance, flying over a ploughed field, he took a photo and sent it to the Fendi specialists, who reinterpreted its furrows in fur to invent shaved mink. He owned around 30 ipads and used them to fire off ideas in all directions at all times of day or night, though he wasn’t always hi-tech, preferring faxes to emails and letter-writing to both.
During my last meeting in New York with Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s head of fashion and Lagerfeld’s opposite number on the business side, I asked as delicately as I could about his health. ‘Yes, yes, he’s fine,’ assured Pavlovsky. ‘As energetic and full of ideas as ever.’ It was an unspoken rule, whenever you spoke to anyone at Chanel or Fendi, that you mustn’t ask about succession plans because Karl was going to live for ever. If only that had been the case.