I once read an interview with famous fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. He was describing a room and complaining about the way it was decorated.
“It was a lot of Louis Quinze mixed with Louis Seize,” he said. And then, he added: “Ugh!”
So, what he didn’t like, just to be clear, was when people mix up furniture from the period of Louis XV, roughly 1700 to 1750, with the furniture from the period of Louis XVI, roughly 1750 to 1800.
I looked it up. Here is the chief difference, the “ugh factor,” you might say, between the two: The Louis XV chairs are curvy and oval-backed, and the Louis XVI chairs are curvy, too, but sometimes have shield-shaped backs.
Apparently, when they’re in the same room together, the only civilized response is, “Ugh!”
It’s impressive to have a pet peeve that specific and also one that I’m pretty sure very, very few people share. It’s unlikely that any but a handful of people reading that interview, when they came to the “Ugh!” part, nodded and smiled in recognition. “So true, Karl, so true,” said nearly no one.
Stand-up comics, of course, become famous for identifying and describing things that bug all of us, or at least a plurality of us.
“Don’t you hate it when…” is how a lot of comedians still get their starts. They connect with audiences by sharing the common irritations of life — the guy behind you who honks his horn one nanosecond after the light turns green, trying to buy apples at the supermarket without making the apple pyramid come tumbling down, putting your credit card into that thing and it says “DO NOT REMOVE CARD,” and then, it suddenly says “REMOVE CARD” and beeps alarmingly so that you always feel like however you’re doing it, you’re doing it wrong and too slowly. And, of course, the entire universe of complaints around printer ink.
“Don’t you hate it when they mix up Louis Quinze with Louis Seize?” is probably what we might call niche comedy. Something for Hulu, say, tightly targeted at decorative arts historians and museum period-room curators.
But if you’re Karl Lagerfeld, maybe it is irritating to see all of those chairs, some oval-backed and some shield-backed, all mixed up and jumbled together, higgledy-piggledy style. If you’re someone like Lagerfeld, all you think about, presumably, is the way things look, the style of stuff around you, the design choices that have been made. If you’re Lagerfeld, mixing up the Louies might really be hard to shut up about.
But I’m not Karl Lagerfeld, and neither are you. Although, speaking for myself, I get into Lagerfeld-like patterns all the time.
I was watching a show last week with a friend of mine and didn’t realize that I was being Lagerfeld about it.
“Oh no,” I said, out loud, “this part is so clearly a response to a network executive’s note.” And then later: “OK, this part is stupid, but I bet the actor insisted on it even though it’s a detour from what the episode is about.” And then later: “See, I think they had agreed to do seven episodes, but they only really had five episodes worth of plot elements, so that’s why these two episodes are so slow and not funny.” And finally: “That whole story resolution comes in a phone call? Ugh!”
As I said, I didn’t realize I was Lagerfelding until I looked up and realized, from the expression of the person I was watching it with, that I was slowly removing all of the pleasure and the joy out of the show.
And doing it to myself, too, in the way that I imagine Lagerfeld, seeing the chaos of Louis Quinze and Louis Seize, prevented anyone else from enjoying the canapes at the fashion show (or wherever) but also prevented himself from enjoying them, too.
Lagerfeld was probably correct that mixing your Louies is a suboptimal move, just as I had valid points to make about the overuse of some tricks of the screenwriting trade.
Sometimes, though, it seems like we are all Lagerfelding each other all the time — on social media, in politics, on cable news. Half of the problems we face right now are caused, in a way, by one group looking at something that’s basically OK, not perfect, not ideal, but OK, and dismissing it with a Lagerfeldian “Ugh!”
“Am I ruining this for you?” I asked my friend.
I didn’t get an answer, which is another way of getting an answer. We watched the rest of the show together in silence, and, honestly, it was pretty good.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
