In his 22 years as Chanel's designer, 'Kaiser Karl' has earned a fearsome reputation. He even describes himself as a fashion hit man. But that's not the real Karl Lagerfeld, writes Cathy Horyn
Even at his own superhuman rate, Karl Lagerfeld was a busy man last summer and autumn. On July 31st he was in Monaco for the 18th birthday party of Charlotte Casiraghi, a daughter of his friend Princess Caroline. Both mother and daughter wore Chanel, as might be expected. Chanel may not be Lagerfeld's house, but nobody would dispute his role, after 22 years as its designer, in making Chanel the most glamorous of fashion names.
On August 4th he was at his home in Biarritz, where we took a spin in one of his golf carts - Lagerfeld in a high-collared white shirt, jeans, a black cardigan and many rings - to see his new state-of-the-art photography studio and library, containing every vinyl record he has ever owned and about 100,000 books. Two days later he flew to Deauville to spend the weekend with Alain Wertheimer, who owns Chanel, and his wife, Brigitte. Recently, Wertheimer expressed his gratitude to Lagerfeld by saying he would sell Chanel when Lagerfeld decides to retire, a gesture that nobody, least of all these two men, would take seriously. Chanel has been in the Wertheimer family since 1954, when they bought out Coco Chanel. Wertheimer and his brothers own the company lock, stock and barrel. What's more, says Françoise Montenay, the president of Chanel, the company's revenues are greater - when you add up the bottles of No 5, the tubes of lipstick, the quilted bags, the pearl earrings, the camellia hair bows, the tweed jackets - than those of Louis Vuitton, which last year totalled €3 billion. That would make Chanel the world's biggest luxury-goods company.
Still, the statement, serious or not, says a lot about the value of Lagerfeld's role, which Lagerfeld - the last of a line of rich, cultivated Swedes and Germans, who today professes no attachments to anything or anyone - sums up as that of "a professional hit man". The rest of August was spent in Biarritz, catching up on paperwork (Lagerfeld, who doesn't use a secretary, keeps a separate desk for each language he speaks), entertaining Caroline's kids and giving his approval to a Chanel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, which opens on May 2nd and will be the social event of the season.
By early September he was in Paris and at work on collections for Chanel, Fendi and Lagerfeld Gallery. On September 23rd, having spent the afternoon at Chanel, he dropped by Café de Flore, where he is something of a regular, and signed four autographs before leaving at 1am. The next day he flew to Milan to attend a dinner given by Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, for the artist Anselm Kiefer, making a belated entrance in a floor-length kilt designed by his friend Hedi Slimane, of Dior. He was back in Paris the following day, but within 36 hours he was again in Milan, for fittings at Fendi. It was the only time in four months I sensed boredom behind the dark glasses. Other than his pay cheque from Fendi and his friendship with Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy, you have to wonder what keeps him there. The last fur collection was substandard, and none of his ready-to-wear is being bought by US department stores. "Still, he gets reviewed and photographed, and he keeps the whole machine going," said a former Fendi executive.
A week later, on October 6th, Lagerfeld started fittings for the Chanel show, which would involve 95 models and much stage work, as the plan was to simulate a film premiere, with Nicole Kidman, to whom Chanel had paid millions to appear in its No 5 ads, as the main star. The next day he rose early and stayed in his bedroom, sketching and talking on the phone, in one of his long white nightshirts, until almost noon, when he dressed, put on his rings and the black neck cord that holds the wedding rings of his parents and left for Chanel. He did more fittings until mid-afternoon, when he decided to clear his head with a shopping trip to Dior.
The night after the Chanel show Lagerfeld gave a dinner for about 200 people at his home on the Rue de l'Université, where two large rooms had been built in the garden, one with a ceiling of painted starlight. Later, when the dancing started, he cloistered himself in a room nearby, a room that, with its German expressionist posters and furniture from Berlin in the 1920s, is in many ways the most German in the house. For, whatever else has gone into making up Lagerfeld's personality, his Germanness still ranks as his most profound and unexamined quality. And for the next several hours he took portraits of guests for a magazine.
On November 12th, as Lagerfeld was in Paris preparing for a series of shows he would give in Tokyo, 1,000 people entered H&M on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the first hour of business to buy his new line. "He's an icon," said Marni Low, a 24-year-old New Yorker, as she grabbed €35 skirts and tops. Low had chosen the right word. Lagerfeld has been in fashion for 50 years and can trace his start to a time when Paris couture houses were uniquely sordid places but could provide an unparalleled education in dressmaking to a receptive teenage boy. But this was not the thought on Low's mind that morning, if it ever will be. In a sense, all fashion today is irrelevant, subordinate to the crowd-pleasing demands of marketing and celebrity, and, as such, requires that its designers be performers as well. When Lagerfeld puts on his rings in the morning, he's not just accessorising, he's getting ready for his act. What's more, he doesn't have to believe in the outrageousness of his act; it's a construction, no more real than the menacing-looking posters of him that filled the windows at H&M. As Lady Amanda Harlech, his English muse, said: "I think a lot of people almost make a cartoon out of Karl, which is slightly what he plays. He's Kaiser Karl. And he's not. He's a very gentle, subtle man." In fact, in regard to his personal conduct, Lagerfeld holds views that could be described as Calvinist. What matters, though, is that the public buys his act. This was the point he sought to prove with the H&M deal, he told me in Biarritz. "Now I'm like a personage who's nearly unrelated to fashion," he said.
On the evening of November 27th Gan telephoned Lagerfeld's house and was surprised to hear from the butler that Lagerfeld hadn't left for Tokyo. In all, 100 people from Chanel in Paris would make the trip, including executives, seamstresses, models and Lagerfeld's personal chef, and more executives would come from New York. When Lagerfeld got on the phone he said that he couldn't talk, that he was packing and that his flight to Japan was scheduled to leave at midnight. At 10.30pm Gan called Lagerfeld's driver and was told Lagerfeld hadn't left the Rue de l'Université. Finally, at 11.15, Lagerfeld, who seldom hurries for anything, called Gan from the car as it sped towards the airport and, in an innocent voice that his friends can imitate with Teutonic perfection, said he couldn't help it. "Nineteen suitcases is a lot to pack." On December 2nd, after giving one of several shows in Tokyo, Lagerfeld went out in the street and began photographing three male models for a magazine spread. Lagerfeld doesn't stick to any schedule except the one he organises each morning in his head, and then it's subject to his frequent whims. "It's why I'm late very often," he said. "I want to be free until the last minute." This makes no difference to people who know him well, such as Montenay at Chanel, who accepts his lack of punctuality as a small price to pay for his tremendous output. But to those who don't have this perspective, who are stuck in offices and workrooms until he shows up, it makes him their jailer. Patrizio Bertelli, Prada's chief executive, used to become furious at the delays when he was an owner at Fendi.
On December 13th Lagerfeld dropped the stunning news that he had sold his trademarks - among them Karl Lagerfeld, Lagerfeld Gallery and KL - to Tommy Hilfiger. The two had first met in July, when Lagerfeld took Hilfiger's portrait for Harper's Bazaar. Given Lagerfeld's other activities last autumn, the decision to sell his brands suggests he wanted to play the table while it was still hot and, with any luck, erase the impression that he's never been able to make a success with his own name.
There is something else about the timing of the sale that is curious. Lagerfeld says he is 66, although he's probably older. (He has been cagey about his age since a German newspaper unearthed a baptismal record giving his date of birth as September 10th, 1933. But at least he has been consistent about any fibbing, which suggests the truth lies somewhere in between.)
He has been in a de-accessioning mode for several years, coinciding with his decision to throw out the sausages and fat clothes and return to the shape he knew for most of his adult life. He sold off his collection of 18th-century furniture. Gone as well are the chateau in Brittany - where the two people closest to him, his mother and his friend Jacques de Bascher, are buried in a chapel - and the house in Hamburg, on the Elbe, that he bought and restored in a style that had fairly ceased to exist in Germany after 1933. As he told me in September: "I don't want to be in Berlin in 1910. I don't want the 1920s. I want now. I want as little as possible. That means divine beds, some writing tables, TV screens and books and books and books to read."
That Lagerfeld can hold such opposing views - between absolute personal freedom and absolute self-control, between artistic excess and everyday comforts - and not only hold them but also keep them in balance, is the central quality of his personality. Yet almost no journalist has thought to put two and two together. Lagerfeld hinted at this lapse himself one night when he told me that he had recently met Yoko Ono at a party and that she had said to him: "You know, we're not as horrible as people think we are." Behind the dark glasses and the sometimes mean remarks lies a very simple man, but you would never know that unless you were willing to admit the one thing that makes him different: he's German.
In 1997 Lagerfeld published a book called Ein Deutsches Haus. Thinly a collection of photographs he took of his Hamburg house before it was sold, Ein Deutsches Haus is actually a visual monograph of Lagerfeld himself - recognisably literate, playfully structured to expose the warm interior behind the blunt edifice. And as there are no words (for once Lagerfeld took his mother's advice and shut up; more about that in a moment) the black-and-white photos function like a silent film. You begin on the outside, with a view of the frozen woods and facade, then progress through rooms of heavy upholstery lightened by bits of sentimental frou-frou (a lamp wearing a ruffled shade) until you reach the metaphysical centre: a square, book-rimmed hallway. From there you enter the intimate spaces: Lagerfeld's bedroom (here you are conscious that the emphasis isn't on luxury as much as on impeccable housekeeping), the bathrooms (a spa town itself); you see his drawing things, a portrait of his mother in a boyish bob from Berlin in the 1920s. Then, almost abruptly, you are back out where you began, in the cold.
Lagerfeld now says that he wants "no roots in any sense of the word" and that the reason he sold the Hamburg house was that he realised he couldn't reclaim the world of his childhood. In fashion terms he has also resisted the idea of owning a house, beginning in the 1960s, when he worked anonymously for companies such as MaxMara. "I never wanted my name on the business," he said. But Lagerfeld has always carried around his ideals like a protective shell. He has not only read Goethe but also embodied his notion that man must believe in himself alone. He was eight when he read Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann's novel about a declining Lübeck family. Mann was preoccupied with the subject of dualism - between the artistic, decadent spirit and the wholesome, ordinary life. Lübeck is also five minutes from where Lagerfeld's father had his condensed-milk factory, and Mann's Tonio Kröger was set on the same street in Hamburg where he had his office. "So what Mann describes is very normal to me and very German in a way I can understand," he said.
Lagerfeld also has a deep moral streak. Nobody might believe it, but Lagerfeld avoided the promiscuity of the 1970s. Partly this was because he saw it destroy the lives of people he loved - no one more than Bascher, who died of Aids, in 1989 - and partly it was because of his own internal rules. And he doesn't accept the need, great in designers, to lead double lives. When I asked, teasingly, "Okay, but, Karl, who have you loved?" he replied: "Nobody will know, but I certainly never went to the bushes. If you're in this business, and you're supposed to create elegant things, you don't do that."
During the war Lagerfeld and his family lived in Hamburg but moved to the countryside before the bombings of 1943. His parents didn't discuss the war or Hitler, so Lagerfeld never fully knew what was happening. "They gave me a feeling of total security; nothing could happen to me," he said. More unusually, Lagerfeld was surrounded by very old, vastly experienced people. His father was born in 1880. He was in San Francisco in 1906 when the earthquake hit, waking with a chandelier in his bed. He spoke nine languages, including his native Swedish, and wanted his son to learn Russian to better enjoy War and Peace. (Alas, the Russians arrived before he could.)
Lagerfeld's mother, a pampered daughter of a provincial governor, rarely spoke to her son. She referred to him as "the old chest of drawers", for his mahogany-black hair, and inadvertently encouraged his rapid-fire speech because she didn't have the patience to listen to his stories. After he had moved to Paris and was working at Balmain, she commended him, in her fashion. She said: "It's good you're doing a job like this. It shows you have no pretension or ambition. Otherwise you wouldn't be doing a job like this." He says his mother never attended a show of his, even after she moved to France. "She said, 'Well, I didn't go to your father's office, either.' " He laughed. "What can I say?"
Now I skip forward to 1952. Although the following story takes place in Paris, when Lagerfeld was in his teens and living in a hotel for children of diplomats on Rue de la Sorbonne, it relates back to the notion of dualism. Geist and Leben. Spirit and life. Or, in this case, fashion and tomatoes. Friends of Lagerfeld's father had come to the hotel to take him out to lunch. It was Lagerfeld's first day in Paris. "They brought me to a restaurant on the Avenue Montaigne, which was then not a chic place," he recalled. "Afterward, I said to them: 'There's no need to drive me home. I can walk.' I walked for hours. I came home late - late means that the dinner hour was over. And, though I had money of my own, I had never been in a restaurant alone. To go out again in an unknown city in a strange restaurant was something I couldn't face. So I went to my room. I opened the window of the bathroom - it was very hot. There below was the Rue de la Sorbonne and behind it this tiny, dirty street with a movie house on the corner. I saw in this big window a French family - like in a French movie, the father quite fat - eating, and they had salade de tomates. Never in my life have I been so envious of food! I will never, ever forget. Salade de tomates, seen from the window, with the bread, the butter and the red wine. And me, starving."
All his life Lagerfeld has been guided by a powerful sense of intellectual freedom and an equally powerful sense of self-restraint. It is why he is the perfect blend of his mother's carelessness and his father's seriousness. It is why he can delight in a double-entendre but see the fraudulence - and eventual misery - in a double life. It is why he is able to sit in Biarritz on a summer afternoon in 2004 and say: "I was born not to be lost."
Joan Juliet Buck said last autumn: "It's funny how Karl's status has changed. I remember in 1979, when I was moving back to New York, saying to Alex Liberman" - editorial director of Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue - "that I wanted to write about Karl, and he said: 'Why?' " In the 1970s Lagerfeld had the misfortune of being out of fashion because he didn't have his own fashion house. Now fashion has caught up with him. As more and more houses go vacant, as corporations move in, and a kind of boredom and banality takes over, Lagerfeld's decision to remain free and unencumbered has become the ideal.
But this does not mean he hasn't built a house of his own. In the 1940s Mann was the symbolic centre of the German-emigre community in the United States. And although I sense the presence of an inbound dart from the old chest of drawers himself, I defer nonetheless to Mann and a line from a profile that Janet Flanner used to describe his importance: "I shall always go home to the house of Thomas Mann in whatever land." For a lot of people in fashion who still care about ideas and the individual mind, who prize the mean remark as well as the plate of tomatoes, Lagerfeld is their official centre.
"There's such a hatred of thought and intelligence in that world," said Buck, who today lives in New Mexico. "Karl has managed to survive without playing stupid. Who do I miss from Paris?" she repeated. "I would have to say him."
© Cathy Horan
New York Times syndication service