Few people will live on in legend the way fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld will. Although he died on Feb. 19 of cancer “about” the age of 85, his presence, which loomed over the fashion industry for decades, will not soon fade away from Paris runways or from the world.
Lagerfeld is best known for his leadership of Chanel, perhaps the most iconic of the top fashion houses, but had a pretty straightforward biography on paper. He was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1933, left home for Paris at a young age after clashing with his parents because of his unorthodox sense of style, won the International Wool Secretariat, a prestigious design competition, when he was barely 21 years old, and began his career in the House of Balmain.
From there, he proved himself over and over again to some of the world’s greatest fashion houses, before finally landing as the creative director at Chanel in 1982, a position he held until his death last month. On his watch, Bloomberg reports, “Chanel grew into a fashion colossus with beauty counters and boutiques worldwide, 20,000 employees, and operating profit of $2.7 billion on $9.6 billion in sales in 2017. BNP Paribas estimates the brand’s value at more than $50 billion.”
But such a dry recounting of his life would never have suited Lagerfeld, whose mission was to make himself a mythical figure, both personally and as a giant in the world of fashion.
Every detail about Lagerfeld was larger than life, from his signature outfit of starched, high-collared white shirt, black suit, thin black tie, and black gloves, to his designs for Chanel and Fendi, which was a part-time side line. That was nothing if not intentional; he designed it that way, perhaps partly to communicate an aura of creative genius, but also to mask the real man, who did everything he could to escape the ordinary.
Lagerfeld told interviewers that his upbringing was painful. He suffered abuse and rejection and was on his own by the age of 14, pursuing his dream of working for Paris’ most prominent fashion houses. He worked fantastically hard and never sacrificed that ethic to his creativity, even as he rose to his nearly untouchable position at the summit of Chanel. At the time of his death, he was presiding over three separate fashion labels, Chanel, Fendi, and his eponymous Lagerfeld label, and could produce up to 15 fashion collections a year. Most designers struggle to produce three or four. He sometimes went for days without sleep or food.
Lagerfeld’s design reach extended even beyond the haute couture labels of Paris, for he moonlit too, for fast fashion companies such as H&M.
The “real” Lagerfeld was hard to pin down. He had at least two different birth certificates, which is why his exact age is not known, and changed his biography so often it acquired a degree of mythic vagueness, like a superhero origin story. He claimed to drink only Diet Coke and said he owned 300 iPods and kept a single employee whose job it was to manage them. He hinted that he had secret relatives but never secret relationships, and he regularly told interviewers he had never been in love, except with his cat, Choupette, who may get the bulk of her owner’s fortune.
Lagerfeld was also fearless as few today are. He resisted political efforts to change his designs, incorporating fur and French politics into his collections despite criticism, defended his use of thin models, and spoke out sharply on Germany’s immigration policies. When it came to who would follow him at Chanel, he rejected the obvious replacements and trained his own creative director, Virginie Viard, to keep his brand alive.
It is, after all, impossible to replace Karl Lagerfeld, man or myth.
Emily Zanotti is the senior editor of the Daily Wire.
