Karl Lagerfeld obituary
Fashion designer who oversaw the transformation of Chanel
into an intercontinental superbrand
Veronica Horwell
Tue 19 Feb 2019 14.40 GMT Last modified on Tue 19 Feb 2019
18.10 GMT
Karl Lagerfeld in 2011. He evolved into a commentary on the
fashion business: personally stylised into his own logo (glasses, gloves and
the defensive composure for the camera).
The designer Karl Lagerfeld, who has died aged 85, explored
and exploited couture, ready-to-wear and even mass-market fashion for more than
60 years. He had a genius for visual quotation and allusion, impersonation and
pastiche, especially at Chanel, the fashion house he headed for more than three
decades, and it made him the first postmodern fashionmeister.
Nobody else stayed on top of so many labels for so long:
besides Chanel, Lagerfeld headed Fendi, and intermittently had his own-name
brand. And he evolved into a commentary on the whole business: personally
stylised into his own logo (glasses, gloves, the defensive composure for the
camera); encyclopedic about the history of design, yet devoid of sentimental
nostalgia. Edna E Mode, the opinionated couturier in the Pixar cartoon The
Incredibles, says: “I never look back, darling, it distracts from the now.”
Totally Lagerfeld.
Lagerfeld’s first imaginative creation had been himself. His
version set his birth at variable dates on a country estate in
Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, his papa Otto possessed of a fortune from
condensed milk, and mama Elisabeth (nee Bahlmann) a woman of culture.
He told of his strict upbringing, governess, and the
family’s oil painting of the court of Frederick the Great. However, German
records set the date earlier at 1933, downgrade his father to a successful
businessman, his mother to a lingerie saleswoman and the schloss to a manse in
the leafy suburban Baurs Park district of Hamburg, from which the family was
evicted by British occupation forces. He later dropped the final letter of
Lagerfeldt to arrive at a more marketable name.
Witnesses remembered a longhaired outsider determined to be
far from the hungry postwar countryside or grim Hamburg. In both versions, he
was an autodidact who made bold connections between visual aspects of the
zeitgeist.
That was his genuine gift: he combined a historian’s
knowledge of the past with a diarist’s curiosity about the present, and
subjected them to the ruthlessness that ruled his life. Anything and anybody
was abandoned as soon as he considered the present should turn to past. He
called it “vampirising”.
After private school and a spell, at his request, at the
Lycée Montaigne in Paris, Lagerfeld won in the coat category of the 1954
International Wool Secretariat competition, and was invited as apprentice to
Pierre Balmain’s couture house. After that he joined Jean Patou, where he
designed under the name Roland Karl; there was enough family money to pay for a
Mercedes and a social life.
He left in 1962 to work as a designer for upmarket
ready-to-wear firms that had begun to serve customers for whom couture was too
expensive and dressmakers too dowdy. Lagerfeld collected books, a copy to
shelve plus another to gut for images, while observing the current mood on the
streets. His designs were commercial, and his workrate exceptional – ideas in,
sketches out, all of it thrown away immediately on completion, for Krizia,
Ballantyne, Isetan, Charles Jourdan, Tiziani of Rome and many other quality
firms.
In 1967 he took over furs for the Italian firm Fendi, and
did things with pelts none had dared before. For the dreamy frock company
Chloé, which had recruited him in 1963, he used his understanding of old
dressmaking details. Flea market vintage, bought decades before retro was chic,
and his collector’s familiarity with art deco, set the house style; his 1972
deco ready-to-wear collection attracted more attention than most couture shows,
although Lagerfeld’s relationship with Chloé and the other employers remained
discreet. He didn’t take bows.
The fees they paid, plus the extra Lagerfeld accumulated
through using his antennae to deal in antiques and art, funded his high
visibility: attention was paid to his appearance, possessions and the premises
he stashed them in. Andy Warhol borrowed a Lagerfeld apartment as the venue for
a movie, L’Amour (1973), and Lagerfeld adopted Warhol’s creed of
superficiality, although behind that facade lay a wide and deep consumption of
art and literature. Lagerfeld and the Puerto Rican fashion illustrator Antonio
Lopez had a Parisian salon, in the arts not fashion sense, early in the70s.
Along with Warhol, Lopez introduced Lagerfeld to American
pop culture and its idea of fashion based on attitude more than actual
garments. Lopez and Lagerfeld drew competitively. They snapped Instamatics.
They assembled collages, prototypes of the mood boards that began to dominate
collections as fashion expanded its markets in the 1970s.
Lopez and his circle were bankrolled by Lagerfeld, who paid
for clothes and presents – Lagerfeld gave, without stint, personally chosen
gifts to favourites and as business offerings. A Chloé perfume in 1975
increased his income and his flamboyance flared, but his famous fan, tied-back
hair and wild garments never impeded the flow of reliably saleable designs for
clients. Lagerfeld was the German industrial miracle.
His longterm bet that ready-to-wear would prevail
surprisingly brought him in 1982 to the couture house of Gabrielle “Coco”
Chanel, who had died in 1971. The first show, in 1983, was not a critical
success, although his pastiches of Coco’s classics were passable and his
learning about his predecessor unsurpassed: “I’m like a computer who’s plugged
into the Chanel mode,” he said.
By the second collection he had deconstructed her lifework
into a mood board – tweeds, braids, quilted bags, costume jewellery and the
double C logo – and played outrageous games with them. To those who hated his
mockery of Chanel’s practical clothes, he replied the house had been “a
sleeping beauty who snored”.
He was even more radical in understanding the globalisation
of luxury in the 80s. Others had preceded him in staging shows as rock gigs and
recouping the money on perfumes and licensing deals; but Lagerfeld envisaged
Chanel as an intercontinental superbrand, big beyond even the perspicacity of
its then owner Alain Wertheimer, who paid up when Lagerfeld demanded $1m per
collection.
Other houses hired their own necromancers – as the writer
and former editor of French Vogue Joan Juliet Buck wrote, Lagerfeld “started
the Lazarus movement”. He did it best, and his ideas channelled through Chanel
influenced everybody, especially his 90s tweeds simulated in extra-light
fabrics, and unravelled seams and hems.
As soon as he was lord of Chanel, Lagerfeld abandoned Chloé
(he was enticed to return in the 90s) and was backed by the American Bidermann
Industries to produce ready-to-wear under his own name: this line lingered
until bankruptcy in 1997. He bought back his name for a franc, relaunched and,
in 2004, sold his trademarks to Tommy Hilfiger, hiring himself out to design
for them. He used his other talents, as a photographer (for Chanel campaigns,
magazines, galleries), and as publisher of the imprint Edition 7L, which
brought out books that had caught his attention.
Edition 7L’s bestseller was The Karl Lagerfeld Diet (2002),
triggered by his 40kg weight loss: he had denied himself Coca-Cola, cheese and
chocolate cake to emerge from the black tent garb of his more corpulent era and
wear the slimmest Dior. He dropped the fan, although the dark glasses remained,
as did the fingerless gloves to hide the mechanic’s hands of which he was
ashamed, because his mother had loathed them.
This changed appearance became his logo: when in 2004 he
took the logical step of designing a collection for the high-street chain
H&M, billboards of his slender persona sold the goods. He was suddenly a
celebrity, and the Brazilian government had to warn him it could not afford to
provide security for a visit. That his marionette self (there were Steiff bears
in his image, and a toy mouse) now signified more than all the effort of his
lifetime invention seems to have been his choice.
There was nowhere to go but back to work in the present, as
he had always feared not being part of the moment as a death in itself. So he
was soon into social media as each novelty arrived: his Birman cat, Choupette,
had her own Twitter and Instagram accounts, professionally updated.
Yet, with Chanel company money, he secured the future of six
ancient Parisian craft workshops and designed extra, beautiful, collections to
show off their slow handiwork. The newest, global nouveaux riches – “rich as
air” he said, not kindly – failed to impress him, even if his couture shows
expanded into spectacles more operatic than his 1980 designs for Berlioz’s Les
Troyens at La Scala, Milan. Last December the backdrop was an Egyptian temple
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, but he did not appear at the
January show in Paris.
Lagerfeld owned a sequence of Parisian apartments, including
a large chunk of an 18th-century mansion in Saint-Germain, plus residences in
Monte Carlo, Biarritz and Manhattan, not always resided in. He bought and sold
the Château de Penhoët in Brittany, and a mansion near his childhood home (also
sold, the landscape not being as he imagined it).
Much of his antique collection was auctioned for more room
and fewer memories, then he began to acquire again. Among the celebrated
collaborators he repudiated were Lopez, his muses Anna Piaggi and Paloma
Picasso, Inès de La Fressange (for posing as official model for the French
symbol Marianne while under contract to Chanel), and the later house deity
Claudia Schiffer. “The curtain falls,” he said of his curtailment of
friendships. “An iron curtain.” He could be publicly dismissive of strangers,
too, especially the looks and figures of non-ethereal women.
Lagerfeld had adored Jacques de Bascher, a provincial
fantasist who projected himself as an elegant aristo, and subsidised De Bascher
to do the risky living for him, the drugs and sex Lagerfeld held back from. As
Buck said: “He could look at Jacques’ excesses from above, in a princely
fashion; he himself was too grand.” After De Bascher’s death from Aids in 1989,
Lagerfeld mourned him publicly but decreed the official line should be that he
had never fallen in love: “I am just in love with my job.”
A court dismissed Lagerfeld’s suit for invasion of privacy
against Alicia Drake, after the most telling chapter of her fashion memoir, The
Beautiful Fall (2006), described the suicide near Penhoët of a member of
Lagerfeld’s entourage, which barely paused the posing and sketching at the
château.
“I’m floating. Nobody can catch me, mmm?” was a Lagerfeld
remark. So was, “I don’t know what normal means.”
• Karl Otto Lagerfeld, fashion designer, born 10 September
1933; died 19 February 2019
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