The ugly truth about Karl Lagerfeld’s reign / Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld was right about fashion and wrong about women

The ugly truth about Karl Lagerfeld’s reign

Tanya Gold

‘It is impossible to watch Karl Lagerfeld’s work and think he really liked women.

The high priest of Chanel made his money from placing women in unhappy competition with their childish selves

Fri 22 Feb 2019 18.12 GMT Last modified on Fri 22 Feb 2019 18.44 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/22/women-karl-lagerfeld-chanel

Karl Lagerfeld is dead, and the fashion industry he presided over from the house of Chanel rends its garments and calls itself heartbroken. His muse, a white cat called Choupette, which exists largely on Twitter – a metaphor for his misanthropy so pure I thank him – was photographed in a mourning veil, thanking us for our words of condolence. That his best beloved was literally inhuman, and very small, is no surprise. (It is rumoured that, if she exists, she will inherit his fortune, though that is illegal in France.)

I do not think Lagerfeld really liked women. It is impossible to watch his work and think he did. It is impossible to watch his face – immobile, from surgery or not, I can’t say – and think he liked himself. It is obvious, and often noted, that fashion doesn’t have to be misogynistic and exclusionary; fashion is merely expression, and expression is morally neutral. But it certainly became those things in the era when Lagerfeld was dominant. In a world that is pure hierarchy, he had the power of a medieval pope, and he could have used it to make fashion less exclusionary, and more joyful. Consider the changes that Edward Enninful is making at British Vogue. He employs Paris Lees, a trans woman, as a columnist, and his first cover featured Adwoa Aboah, a mixed-race woman. Lagerfeld was rarely so benevolent or brave: profit was his calling, and misogyny his method. At home, meanwhile, he preferred to idolise a cat.

The couture shows in Paris, at which he excelled, power the global fashion machine and send it to the duller parts of Earth. He decided what was lovely and what was not, who should be noticed and who should be ignored. None of this would matter if it didn’t have that power – fashion, when cornered, cites its triviality as a defence – except it did. The machine sold perfumes and handbags (almost no one can afford couture, and that kind of money is a sickness in itself) by offering an ever-receding image of beauty that no normal woman could ever attain, let alone hold. The girls who wore his clothes, which were as insubstantial as a fleeting dream (he was an artist, and his works expressed his philosophy perfectly), were very young and tiny. They seemed, when you watched them, only just born, with no blemish on them, existing only for the adornment of Lagerfeld’s feathers and bows.

There is nothing wrong with being young and lovely, but it is a passing moment in a woman’s life, and he offered nothing for women who do not look like that – ie, almost all women – but a remorseful look in the glass, and exile. He employed older women at Chanel (he had to, for models and cats cannot do everything), but they had to grasp backwards towards youth. Their faces were over-smooth and indistinct at the edges, as if they lived under a curse: a woman uneasy in her own face, a woman who cannot age. Young women – fresh clay for his myth – were what he craved. He placed women everywhere in unhappy competition with their childish selves, and I can think of nothing sadder or more destructive of the very soul that fashion is supposed to liberate. I imagine that had he seen a woman excrete, he would have vomited.

It is worth noting, again, that he didn’t make the clothes himself; and the clothes themselves were almost incidental to his art. Rather, he made powerful and spurious myths. The clothes were made by a group of dedicated, vastly skilled women (and a few gifted men) in an eyrie at the top of the house of Chanel. It is the same in almost every fashion house. You see these artisans credited fully only when a designer – John Galliano, for instance, or Lee Alexander McQueen – loses himself within the artifice he builds. Then they are celebrated, a small truth offered as penance for fashion’s crimes, and things return to the abnormal normal.

Lagerfeld’s art had a wider impact even than inciting self-hatred in women for ordinary profit, and enchanting intelligent women to collude in it, which was always the most extraordinary montage that fashion offered. The world grew more unequal when Lagerfeld ruled fashion. That beauty – the very apex and definition of beauty – belonged only to the almost unimaginably rich added power to the gospel of prosperity theology that ruled the age, and which has brought us to such anger and terror. To the rich, everything, for they are fairies or gods; and to the rest, the crumbs. He was, at his heart, a handmaiden to the unequal world we have made, and although you can argue for its transient loveliness, it was always uglier, and more important, than that.

• Tanya Gold is a journalist

Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld was right about fashion and wrong about women

by Madeline Fry

 | February 19, 2019 04:34 PM

 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/chanels-karl-lagerfeld-was-right-about-fashion-and-wrong-about-women

Karl Lagerfeld, one the 20th century’s greatest fashion designers, died Tuesday in Paris. Credited with saving Chanel when he became its creative director, Lagerfeld was known, not only for his stylistic brilliance, but also his outspoken and controversial comments.

His perspective on fashion was invaluable, but his critiques of women represent the darker side of the industry.

The haute couture king told the New York Times that fashion designers are artisans, not artists. As catwalk looks have become increasingly unattainable, with models debuting styles you wouldn’t see anywhere but the runway, Lagerfeld emphasized fashion’s utility.

Designers “take themselves very seriously because they want to be taken as artists,” he said. “I think we are artisans. It’s an applied art. There’s nothing bad about that. If you want to do art, then show it in a gallery.”

Despite his lifetime contracts with high-fashion labels Chanel and Fendi, Lagerfeld embodied a down-to-earth perspective on clothes. “People buy dresses to be happy,” he said.

But the designer’s legacy is tainted by the way he conformed to industry stereotypes. Fashion may have been more than a piece of art to him, but women were not.

Lagerfeld had a habit of complaining about women’s bodies, whether he was saying they looked ugly or need to lose weight. He called Adele “a little too fat,” as an aside while discussing her lovely voice, and later insulted plus-sized women again: “No one wants to see curvy women on the catwalk.”

He also grumbled about other people's faces. In 2012, he insulted Pippa Middleton saying the Duchess of Cambridge is beautiful, but “her sister struggles. I don’t like the sister’s face. She should only show her back.”

Worst of all, Lagerfeld dismissed objections to sexual harassment in the industry. He told Numero magazine last spring that he was "fed up" with the #MeToo movement. "If you don’t want your pants pulled about," he said, "don’t become a model! Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent."

Lillian Fallon, a New York City-based fashion writer, said Lagerfeld’s conflicting legacy represents a broader trend. “His comments on plus-size women and models in general kind of summarize the elitist attitude of the fashion industry and the treatment of women as objects meant for consumption,” Fallon said. “He seemed to embody a lot of the negative stereotypes of the fashion industry.”

Lagerfeld “really was not on board with the push to have a more accurate representation of women and wasn’t really interested in diverse beauty.”

While obituaries focus on his more humorous quotes — Lagerfeld once said that “sweatpants are a sign of defeat” — we should remember that he was only halfway revolutionary. The designer’s legacy was one of breaking fashion trends but conforming to its old tropes.