In March
2023, it was announced that a television series around the life and career of
famed fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, was in production for the streaming
service Disney+, with Daniel Brühl starring as the titular character. Also
joining the cast were Théodore Pellerin as Jacques de Bascher, Arnaud Valois as
Yves Saint Laurent, Alex Lutz as Pierre Bergé, Agnès Jaoui as Gaby Aghion, and
Sunnyi Melles as Marlene Dietrich. Jérôme Salle would direct the episodes one,
two, and six, while Audrey Estrougo would be directing the other three
episodes.
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Karl Lagerfeld and Pierre Bergé, the story of the ‘cruelest hatred’ in the world of fashion
The legendary designer and the businessman behind Yves
Saint Laurent maintained a personal feud that would last for decades. On the
occasion of the upcoming premiere of ‘Becoming Karl Lagerfeld’ — the miniseries
about the German designer, which addresses this confrontation — EL PAÍS looks
at the reasons for his staunch hatred of Bergé
STEPHANE
CARDINALE - CORBIS (SYGMA VIA GETTY IMAGES)
CARLOS
MEGÍA
MAY 11,
2024 - 05:40 CEST
The iconic
fashion editor Suzy Menkes was the first person who dared to outline an epic
rivalry. She established a simile about it, using one of the great (and
frequently denied) historical legends of artistic envy: “Karl was Salieri going
up against Mozart, who was Saint Laurent.” Exchanging the imperial Vienna of
the 18th century for the Paris of the 1970s — and swapping out music for
fashion — the truth is that the recent history of style cannot be understood
without the well-documented antagonism between Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint
Laurent. The two fashion geniuses crossed paths when they were almost
teenagers: in 1954, they both shared first prize at the International Wool
Secretariat (IWS). Although Lagerfeld — popularly known as “the Kaiser,” due to
his German roots — maintained that they had been friends for a long time, the
truth is that the dazzling success of the Algerian-born Saint Laurent starkly
contrasted with Lagerfeld’s discreet beginnings. Each man had an ego as big as
his own work, which helped separate their trajectories.
However,
along with their differences, there’s one person who played a key role in
creating distance between the two designers and whose influence had a big role
on their respective lives. In the upcoming Hulu miniseries Becoming Karl
Lagerfeld — which focuses on the designer who, for a time, was the creative
director at Chanel — the figure of Pierre Bergé is revealed. For years, he was
known as the “pitbull of French fashion.”
“Karl’s
problem is the following: it’s like two starlets in the theater or cinema, when
one becomes Marilyn Monroe and the other is a nobody. I like Karl a lot — I’ve
known him forever. He’s really cultivated and very intelligent. Karl’s big
problem is that he’s never been successful with his own label. And he hasn’t
been able to reach the same level of success as under the name of Chanel. It’s
sad,” Bergé told Vogue in 2015.
The man who
was Saint Laurent’s right-hand man — co-founder of the eponymous brand and the
designer’s romantic partner for decades — was never a friend of political
correctness. The auditions to succeed Yves as creative director of his own firm
offer evidence of Bergé's severity and dogmatism: after describing Tom Ford’s
tenure as a “fiasco” and “pure marketing,” he went on to dismiss Stefano
Pilati, calling his time at the fashion house “nothing at all.”
Bergé was
lying when he said that he liked Karl. The antipathy between them was such that
— according to the Kaiser himself — they went 40 years without speaking a word
to each other. “He’s from another era,” Lagerfeld told WWD, in response to the
accusations leveled against him by the businessman. “The times aren’t the same.
He has to adapt to the times. The times don’t have to adapt to him. If he
doesn’t like them, he should shut up and retire.”
Comparisons
with Saint Laurent always gave Lagerfeld a complex. When he finally managed to
succeed in the industry, he attacked him without remorse: “That particular Yves
I don’t like, because I know another one. He’s one of the funniest people
alive, with an incredible sense of humor… but he only had one desire: to be
rich and famous.”
“Lagerfeld
and Bergé started out as friends. They shared Bergé's love of books, but their
relationship deteriorated over time. Bergé saw Yves Saint Laurent as an artist
and a genius, but not Lagerfeld. And he made him feel that way. He also
despised his German roots, in contrast to Yves’s French taste. Karl told me
that he felt that his friendship with Yves had been destroyed by Bergé and that
he probably played a role in his estrangement from him. For Bergé, there was
only one place at the top of the pyramid… and it was for Yves,” explains Marie
Ottavi, a journalist and biographer of Lagerfeld, in an interview with EL PAÍS.
The main
reason for their enmity is a love triangle that Bergé never approved of, with
the dandy Jacques de Bascher at the center of it. For two decades, this
Parisian aristocrat maintained a platonic relationship with Lagerfeld, until
his death from AIDS in 1989. They were two opposite personalities: while the
couturier was a working man — a puritan who was allergic to parties — the
enthralling De Bascher enjoyed alcohol, drugs, and orgies on a daily basis. “He
was the funniest and most different person I’ve ever met. Wild, chic, and fun.
He had all the flaws and all the qualities. For me, he was divine… but others
found him diabolical,” the German designer alleged.
During one
of those nights of hedonism and debauchery, De Bascher would meet Saint
Laurent, a tormented genius who also made excess his way of life. This was much
to the chagrin of Bergé, who broke off his romantic relationship with Yves when
he found himself unable to “channel” the designer. In her book The Beautiful
Fall, Alicia Drake wrote that Yves had a brief affair with Jacques de Bascher
(with the full knowledge of a non-possessive Lagerfeld). And it was precisely
Lagerfeld who realized that Bergé always thought that he had been the
instigator behind the union of two souls with a tendency towards
self-destruction. “I had been close friends with Yves for more than 20 years —
Pierre smashed that to bits. He said I engineered their liaison to destabilize
the house of Saint Laurent,” the German told W Magazine.
“The
relationship between them was devastating, because Yves fell madly in love with
Jacques. It had an impact on his work,” Ottavi adds, underlining the extreme
vigilance that Bergé exercised over Yves’ excesses, so as to protect his
textile empire. “If the romance had become serious, it could have disrupted the
entire YSL [fashion] house, and also Bergé's authority. But the story was
purely sexual. Although Bergé thought that Lagerfeld had orchestrated
everything, seeing him as the organizer of the romance is going a bit far. He
just found it amusing to see the chaos he caused,” Ottavi shrugs. Be that as it
may, the friendly relationship between the creatives perished forever when De
Bascher joined the equation.
This
passionate episode will be one of the dramatic pillars of the Becoming Karl
Lagerfeld series. Actor Daniel Brühl plays the Hamburg-born designer during the
years he spent struggling to reach the top of haute couture and become head of
Chanel. His relationships with Saint Laurent, De Bascher and Bergé — the axes
of that professional journey — are also depicted.
Even after
the death of the first two, Bergé and Lagerfeld didn’t bring an end to their
long confrontation. “That their mutual hatred became public only accentuated
the resentment between them. In my books, I describe the atrocities that were
said… it was very cruel,” Ottavi notes. “Yves Saint Laurent was a pioneer and
invented pieces that will go down in fashion history. Yet, his genius closed on
him like a trap. Karl remained connected to the times: he reinvented himself
and breathed new life into Chanel, that sleeping beauty that he managed to
modernize. Each one had their own strengths…”
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