karl lagerfeld

All-round phenomenon

It’s hard to know how to start describing Karl Lagerfeld, one of our 2009 Guest Editors. ‘Renaissance man’ hardly does justice to this preternaturally prodigious polymath, who has been Chanel’s chief designer since 1983, not to mention performing a similar role at Fendi and running his own label on the side. Then there’s his book-publishing, his photography, his illustrations, his mammoth accumulation of books and furniture and houses. ‘I like to collect,’ Lagerfeld explains, ‘not to own.’

For Wallpaper* he photographed Alvar Aalto’s Maison Louis Carré and the artist Claude Lévêque, as well as his muse of the moment, the French model Baptiste Giabiconi, wearing a Boucheron necklace designed by Marc Newson; in the Queen’s Theatre at Versailles; sprawling disrobed on a ‘Pebble’ seat by the Bouroullec brothers; and full-frontal in a Roman catacomb and on the cover.

Since then Lagerfeld has become, if possible, even more famous and productive, while his catwalk shows for Chanel have become more extravagant year-on-year. Recent highlights include large-scale mock-ups of supermarkets, moon rockets and the Eiffel Tower.

‘I am a vampire – open to everything and attached to nothing,’ Lagerfeld told us. And one does wonder where his extraordinary energy comes from. Now in his eighties, Karl has become a bit like the Eiffel Tower himself: part of the cultural landscape, and worth celebrating with a lot of flashing lights.

‘When I do photography, I look with another eye than when I do something for myself ’