When is the last time you have lusted—truly lusted—after something you saw in a shop window? Can you even remember?
Because 10 minutes into Karl, a new documentary on Karl Lagerfeld directed by Nick Hooker (with AIR MAIL Co-Editor Graydon Carter as executive producer), you may find yourself trolling 1stDibs for something, anything, this madman dreamed up over his nearly 60-year career.
Now that he’s six years in the grave, the fashion world has moved from mourning to celebration, and who can blame them? Unlike his competitors at the luxury houses—many of whom are bizarrely sequestered from the press like modern-day Greta Garbos, presumably so they won’t say anything stupid—he always gave us something to talk about.
In Karl, Hooker looks beyond the ponytailed personality to reveal the clothes that made the man. This sumptuous documentary is stitched together with the same level of craftsmanship exhibited by Chanel’s petites mains. Instead of embellishments and brocade, Karl has gorgeous animations by Rohan Patrick McDonald and evocative music curated by Michel Gaubert, a longtime Lagerfeld collaborator.
Lagerfeld didn’t talk much about World War II, but as a small child growing up in Hamburg, the July 1943 bombings that killed an estimated 34,000 people (and destroyed 60 percent of the city’s homes) surely left a mark. “Beauty becomes a form of resistance,” says Hooker, who contextualizes Lagerfeld’s life through his early experiences. “His whole life was creating this zone of beauty and creativity around him, always filling it with interesting people and conversation, constantly being infected with the latest currents of music, literature, and movies.”
Before Lagerfeld ascended to the throne of Chanel, in 1983, he had high-profile positions at Balmain, Patou, and Chloé. But that glory came after decades of working on many brands simultaneously—up to 20, at one point. “They’re all jealous of each other,” he said slyly. “I play one against the other, and I think it’s very amusing.”
A fountain of ideas as well as a master delegator, he never wasted a second, issuing orders and maxims (“Sweatpants are a sign of defeat,” “Don’t dress to kill, dress to survive”) in clipped English, German, and French.
But drawing was his primary language; he dashed off sketches like a dry cleaner scribbling out receipts. It was up to his deputies, and ateliers full of seamstresses, embroiderers, and fabric whisperers, to bring the looks to life. A no-nonsense première named Anita Briey, who spent 52 years under Lagerfeld’s thumb, described every moment of this as “pure pleasure,” even though Lagerfeld was forever fiddling with her work. “To not understand his sketches, really, you had to be stupid,” she explains, with just a touch of Stockholm syndrome.
In the 70s, when Lagerfeld was making his name at Chloé, he was at the center of a lively, sexy social scene that included Yves Saint Laurent, the illustrator Antonio Lopez, and Jacques de Bascher, a male model who became the love of his life. De Bascher was also the source of a romantic feud with Saint Laurent that was documented, to Lagerfeld’s great displeasure, in a 2007 biography by Alicia Drake.
Even when de Bascher moved in, he and Lagerfeld kept separate bedrooms because, the designer said, “I hate intimacy, but my mother was probably the same way.” (She sounds fun: she once told her son to hire a decorator to hang curtains in front of his large nostrils.)
When Lagerfeld arrived at Chanel, in 1983, 99 percent of its business was selling Chanel No. 5. The only person of import wearing the brand’s clothing was the distinctly unexotic French health minister. That was to change. “To revive an old house, you must treat her like a whore,” he explained, and so he made everything younger, sexier, and tinged with wit. He opened his first runway show with a trio of models posing seductively in bleu, blanc, et rouge suits—still French, but next-gen—and fashion was forever changed.
Now absolutely everybody was paying attention. Lagerfeld jetted around the world, greeting his adoring public and shooting off at the mouth with Karlisms that had his publicists gritting their teeth. Would it be O.K. for women to be fat in the future, he was asked. “I’m afraid yes,” he answered despairingly.
Things changed when de Bascher died, of AIDS, in 1989. When asked in an interview if he could ever love again, Lagerfeld replied, “It couldn’t ever be the same and I would never want it to be the same.” So much about him was superhuman—he never drank, took drugs, or slept longer than a few hours each night. “It’s a gift from heaven to have energy,” he told Claudia Schiffer. And yet as his fame ballooned, so did his silhouette. Like so many mortals, he couldn’t help but eat his feelings.
His living became more kingly, and he filled his hôtel particulier on the Rue de l’Université with 18th-century furnishings and books—eventually collecting more than 300,000 of them. He spent lavishly on art, acquiring works by Takashi Murakami and Vincennes porcelain flowers (among many other objets), and once he slimmed down, he commissioned suits from Hedi Slimane at Dior and jewelry from Chrome Hearts. At one point, he owned more than 500 iPods, each dedicated to a different genre of music.
The flowers were another eye-watering line item: he was rumored to spend more than $1 million a year at Lachaume, the florist on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near Chanel’s headquarters. Touchingly, most of the bouquets were dispatched to friends and colleagues.
But all this excess worked, because Lagerfeld realized that the cult of personality—both his and Coco Chanel’s—paid dividends on the sales floor. “I have nothing against mean bitches,” said Lagerfeld of Chanel. “Being mean myself, that’s not a problem.”
It would have been fun to hear from a few enemies, and boy, they were legion. He was no fan of #MeToo, gay marriage, and same-sex adoption; he once called Adele “a little too fat” (but later apologized).
But he undercut that wickedness with humor. Finishing a $50,000 dress with a fabulously gaudy string of fake pearls was only the beginning. He flew in an iceberg from Sweden and kept the room at 25 degrees Fahrenheit during a 2010 show at the Grand Palais. After losing 92 pounds, he co-authored The Karl Lagerfeld Diet so the world could share in his daily regime of 1,200 calories and 10 Diet Cokes. “Vanity is the healthiest thing in life,” he insisted.
Lagerfeld was the first couturier to shill for Diet Coke and design a collection for H&M, which sold out instantly. “I never expected it to make such a splash,” he said, aping humility. Embracing the high-low mix, he was yet again ahead of his time, but there were always whispers that he took these jobs, in part, for the paychecks. Chanel paid well, but his bills were crippling, and he was generous often to a fault, giving a Fabergé diamond as a gift when, surely, a Chanel Jumbo Classic would have been just fine.
In Lagerfeld’s final years, he became even more prone to excess, flying hundreds of editors, models, and movie stars to wherever his heart desired—Santa Monica, Deauville, Venice, Hamburg—for a 15-minute fashion show. Thank goodness for those handbags, whose prices, like the thermostats in an age of global warming, go nowhere but up.
Lagerfeld took fashion into a different stratosphere, and by the end of his run, Chanel’s confections were out of this world in more ways than one. At the Chanel boutique in Beverly Hills, a diminutive Flap bag that will hold little more than an iPhone costs $5,700.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. Instead, he turned what was mostly a pretty dull business into a glorious circus, casting himself as ringleader. Even as terminal cancer tightened its grip, he didn’t slow down.
Several years before his death, he considered his legacy in a television interview. “Cover me up and throw me in the trash—done, over,” he said dismissively. Sorry, honey. Not so fast.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
