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Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific designer of the 20th and 21st centuries and a man whose career has been the prototype of the modern luxury fashion industry, went out on Tuesday in Paris. He was 85 years old.
His death was announced Tuesday by Chanel.
"More than anything I know, it represents the soul of fashion: worried, forward-looking and attentive to our changing culture," said Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, about Mr. Lagerfeld at the Outstanding Achievement Award at the British Fashion Awards in 2015.
Chanel's creative director since 1983 and Fendi since 1965, and founder of his own line, Mr. Lagerfeld was the definition of a polyglot of fashion, able to speak the language of many different brands at the same time ( not to mention many languages themselves: he read in English, French, German and Italian).
At age 80, while most of his peers were retiring in their yachts or estates, he created an average of 14 new collections a year, ranging from couture to the high street, not to mention collaborations and special projects. Her emblematic combinations "haute couture and haute tenue" attracted Rihanna; Princess Caroline of Monaco; Christine Lagarde, Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund; and Julianne Moore.
"Ideas come to you when you work," he said behind the scenes before a 83-year-old Fendi show. As a result, Mr. Lagerfeld has never stopped creating. He was also a photographer and exhibited at the Pinacothèque de Paris. an editor having founded his own imprint for Steidl, edition 7L; and the author of a popular book on the diet of 2002, "The Karl Lagerfeld Diet", on his loss of 92 pounds.
His greatest calling, however, was to be the conductor of his own myth.
A self-identified caricature, with his dark glasses, ponytail ponytail, black jeans, fingerless gloves, starched necklaces, Chrome Hearts jewelery and obsessing dietetic Coca-Cola, he has achieved such level of worldwide notoriety and controversy that a $ 200 Karl The Barbie doll, created in collaboration with the toy maker Mattel, is sold in less than an hour in 2014.
He has been repeatedly nicknamed "genius", "kaiser" and "overestimated". His contribution to fashion was not to create a new silhouette, unlike creators like Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel.
Instead, he created a new type of designer: the metamorph.
That is to say, the creative force that lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its semiology of clothing, then bringing it back to the present with a good dose of disrespect and a good dose of pop culture. .
Not that he said it that way exactly. What he said was: "Chanel is an institution and you have to treat her like a prostitute – and then you get something from her."
This approach became almost daily in the sector, but before Mr. Lagerfeld was hired at Chanel, when the brand erased into an unwavering inapplicability maintained over a stream of perfumes and cosmetics it was a new and surprising idea.
The fact that he dared to act on it and continued to do so with varying degrees of success for decades has transformed not only the destiny of Chanel (who now has revenues of more than $ 4 billion per year), but also his own profile.
And this opened a new path for the following designers, from Tom Ford (who also transformed Gucci) to John Galliano (Dior), Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy, Burberry) and Tomas Maier (Bottega Veneta).
A fashion phenomen"
Those who wanted to fire Mr. Lagerfeld called him a "stylist": a designer who creates his appearance by reusing what already exists, instead of inventing something new. But he rejected the idea of fashion as the art and genius of the designer as a tortured. His goal was more opportunistic.
"I would like to be a multinational fashion phenomenon to a man," he said once.
Indeed, his production as a designer was only rivaled by his success as a master of speaking aphorism, so much so that his quotes were collected in a book entitled "The world according to Karl" in 2013.
Some excerpts of choice: "Sweatpants are a sign of defeat" and "I am very down-to-earth. Just not this earth. "
Whether his statements were true was irrelevant (anyway, it was conceptually true or true at that time). The truth could be a fungible concept for Lagerfeld, who liked to take creative licenses with the past. His year of birth, for example, was controversial: was it 1938, as Chanel believed, or 1933, according to a book by writer Alicia Drake? Or was it 1935, as he told Paris Match magazine in 2013? (The Genealogy Society of Hamburg says that he was born on September 10, 1935.)
His personal inclinations were a constantly changing collection of decades, people and disciplines. His only big fear was to get bored. Her conversations (or monologues) could, in one breath, resonate with Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, from the way the wealthy women slept under ermine sheets, then from the Danish illustrator of Danish fairy tales, Kay Nielsen. His only blind spot was his own mortality, which he refused to acknowledge.
As he said in the 2008 documentary "Lagerfeld Confidential ":" I do not want to be real in the lives of others. I want to be an apparition. "
Karl-Otto Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg from Otto Lagerfeld, a wealthy general manager of the German branch of the American Milk Products Company, and former Elisabeth Bahlmann. Her mother was Otto's second wife and Karl had both an older half-sister, Thea, and an older sister, Martha Christiane.
His mother was, according to all accounts, the most formative influence of his early son, who often reported that he had hated his childhood. His father had moved his family to a small town in northern Germany during the Second World War, and Karl, who was used to wearing a suit and tie at school, did not integrate. not really.
"When I was 14, I wanted to smoke because my mother smoked like crazy," he said. "But my mother said," You should not smoke. Your hands are not so beautiful and it shows when you smoke. "
She was responsible, he said, for the speed with which he spoke and for his voluminous references. During a live interview at Lincoln Center in 2013, he told actress Jessica Chastain that when her mother had asked a question, he "had to respond quickly and that had to be funny".
"If I thought of something to say 10 minutes later, she would slap me.
Teenager, Karl escapes to Paris. Although he did not go to art school or take a classical fashion education in 1954, at the age of 18, he took part in the fashion competition called the International Wool Secretariat (now reborn under the name of the Woolmark International Prize) and wins the award. category of coat; Yves Saint Laurent, also a young designer, won the award in the dresses category that year.
Mr. Lagerfeld was hired by the Pierre Balmain fashion house and stayed for three years until he left for Jean Patou. He remains there five years before deciding to trade the rarer surroundings of couture against a freelance career in the emerging world of ready-to-wear 1960s.
He then worked as an independent designer for Krizia, Ballantyne, Charles Jourdan and Chloe, where he remained for more than 10 years and became close to founder, Gaby Aghion, developing his irreverent brand for the sacred cows of style.
This approach was also seen at Fendi, from the mid-1960s, when the family turned to Lagerfeld to turn the brand, which had gone from a boring middle-class furrier, to a trendy name.
Introducing 'Fun Fur'
He refused to treat too much luxury skins such as mink and sable. Instead, he has shaved, dyed, tufted and otherwise created the concept of "Fun Fur", which gives the brand its double sustainable logo.
Silvia Fendi, the only third-generation member still involved in the brand, said that even when she was a child, "when Karl arrived," she knew that "something special was happening and I had to lend Warning".
He has also started collecting furniture, books, magazines and even apartments. He would plunge into decades and their aesthetic movements, from Art Deco to Memphis, from the Bauhaus to the space age, and then abandon them, selling his carefully prepared acquisitions without nostalgia or emotion (characteristic of his personal relationships, according to those who knew him).
Mr. Lagerfeld left Chloé in 1982 and followed suit with Chanel, returning first in haute couture and the following year in ready – to – wear fashion. It is an alchemical combination of designer and brand, given the rich iconography of the house (strings of pearls, camellias, curly, Cs), which Mr. Lagerfeld treated as toys for him.
A photograph of the original supermodels – Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington – as a biker gang dressed in pastel-colored Chanel bouclé minisuits and biker caps captured her iconoclasm. The women broke the glass ceilings and refused to respect the old rules. Mr. Lagerfeld turned Chanel into armor to wear.
His work expressed so clearly the ethics of the moment that the "muse" of Mr. Lagerfeld, the model Ines de la Fressange, was later chosen as a model for a new bust of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. Lagerfeld, furious at the thought of sharing it, ended their professional relationship (although years later, they put on make-up).
Celebrities flocked to Chanel and Mr. Lagerfeld, who seized the marketing opportunities. He teamed up with director Baz Luhrmann and actress Nicole Kidman to make short promotional films, before then directing Kristen Stewart and singer Pharrell Williams in his own mini-films on Chanel.
When social media exploded, Lagerfeld soon realized how well-publicized imagery had the power to transform a show for business into a show that would resonate in the digital wilderness. He trucked a 265-tonne Swedish iceberg for a collection and built an aircraft hangar, brewery and supermarket (filled with Chanel powder and Chanel pasta) for the others, all in the confines of the Grand Palais, its Parisian presentation is a place of choice.
A cat in luxury
As her professional life became bigger and bigger, her personal life remained a mystery. Mr. Lagerfeld lived alone – with a Burmese cat named Choupette, who became as famous as his master, with his own maids, his pillow, his diamond necklaces and his Instagram account – in a left-bank apartment filled with books and clothes . At Lincoln Center, he estimated his library at 300,000 volumes. He told Susannah Frankel of the British newspaper The Independent that he had more than a thousand of his white Hilditch & Key shirts.
He has traveled with a constantly changing entourage, although his godson, Hudson Kroenig, has been a constant in recent years. Son of one of Lagerfeld's favorite models, Brad Kroenig (Mr. Lagerfeld had traditionally accessorized his Chanel shows with an occasional man), Hudson often appeared on the track with Mr. Lagerfeld to bow.
Ironically, although he created his own brand in 1984, the Lagerfeld range never met the same success or popularity as Chanel and Fendi, which led opponents to suggest that Mr. Lagerfeld was working better in the part of the vision of someone else; his supporters said that he just did not have enough time. (His brand has changed ownership a few times, among investors include PVH, Apax Partners and Tommy Hilfiger).
Although rumors often circulate that Mr. Lagerfeld was sick and about to retire, he never did. He had a life contract with Chanel and Fendi and he had exercised it. If he stopped, he would say that he would be asked so much to stop breathing.
Mr. Lagerfeld was responsible for so many shows, stores and events that in 2017, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, awarded him the highest honor of the city, the Medal of the City of Paris, for his services rendered to the metropolis.
Towards the end of her career, fashion was troubled by questions about the fact that she was demanding too much from her creators, but Mr. Lagerfeld had no truck complaining about it.
"Please do not say I'm working hard," he told Ms. Frankel of The Independent. "No one is forced to do this work and if they do not like it, they should do another one. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear from someone who has suffered for a piece of taffeta. "
His claims were not eternal, but ephemeral. In the end, though, with the personal mark that was Karl Lagerfeld, he may have reached both.
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