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Last Updated: Nov 2nd, 2009 - 17:32:57 |
In the fashion world, Karl Lagerfeld has no peer. His playful designs, fresh vision and appreciation of the female form have made the house of Chanel the ultimate superbrand. Tina Gaudoin has an audience with a fashion legend
The glossy white door to Karl Lagerfeld’s atelier at Chanel, perched at the top of 29-31 rue Cambon in Paris, is firmly closed. Painted in large black letters on the door are the words “MADEMOISELLE PRIVÉ” - a vestige of the previous inhabitant. To the right of the atelier is a tiny, rather unremarkable kitchen, where minuscule mouth-watering cakes and ruby-red fruit drinks perch on tables and where the Chanel staff (dressed in black) take their cigarette breaks. The atmosphere is part decompression chamber, part waiting room. I squeeze self-consciously on to a chair and try to adopt a Zen-like approach. This might not be the best day to interview Karl Lagerfeld. Tomorrow at 10.30am he will reveal his latest couture offering to the world’s press, buyers and clients. Notoriously tardy, he does not wear a watch and even his great friends (loyal to the last; he insists upon it) remark on his poor time-keeping. He is also known to be singularly unhelpful towards journalists whom he does not like. When asked how to gauge if one passes the test, a PR tells a grim-sounding tale about a Spanish journalist who conducted her interview seated, while her subject remained standing imperiously.
Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld’s muse, confidante and general “booster-upper” since 1997 (when she defected from Galliano) bursts out of the atelier trailing black chiffon and Chanel No 5 in her wake. “Cigarette break!” she announces, grinning cheerfully. “Don’t worry. It’s a good day.” And what’s a bad day like? Harlech, who is strikingly good-looking in a brittle, Brit aristo way, doesn’t offer an explanation, but she grimaces liberally. Lagerfeld’s personal PR bustles in. “Are you ready?” she asks, looking solemn, and adds, “Remember to say something to put him at his ease.” This is ironic, because no one could feel less at ease than I at this moment. Another of Karl’s entourage bounds in, “Don’t worry,” he says cheerfully, “we are all behind you!”
In the end it’s all quite painless. I like Monsieur Lagerfeld’s jacket, and I say so. It’s khaki, which is surprising because I’ve never seen him in anything but black. The jacket is by Hedi Slimane, the designer behind Dior’s menswear. It was Slimane who inspired Lagerfeld, 65, to diet away six-and-a-half stone in a matter of 18 months - so that he could wear Dior jackets such as this. It wasn’t love, Lagerfeld explained at the time, that drove him to shrink, but fashion.
Apparently, he and Slimane dance the tango together for exercise, though. “Please sit.” Lagerfeld gestures to a chair perched beside his own at a vast modern desk covered in box upon box of bijoux - ribbons, brooches and necklaces, notepads, pens and sketches. Behind the desk hangs a portrait of Coco Chanel, a dark, hawk-like presence in a cream-carpeted room filled with light and a sense of almost dizzying energy. A model stands motionless while Lagerfeld circles her. He fingers the fabric on her tiny, exquisitely made jacket and makes a couple of alterations to the voluminous skirt. Then he approves her make-up and a Polaroid is taken. A bevy of assistants scribble his instructions on notepads. Harlech, who has seamlessly appeared on a chair to my left, whispers that, this season, “Karl is playing with volume”. When asked what inspiration he began with, she looks nonplussed. “He starts with little more than a line - a phrase.
He doesn’t do trips round the world or anything. He just doesn’t feel the need.” If it can be argued (as it often is) that Coco Chanel, more than any other designer, revolutionised the way women dress in the mid to late 20th century, then it can also be argued that Karl Lagerfeld, who joined the company in 1983, is her worthy successor. Here is a man who, like Mademoiselle (though he hates the comparison), threw out the existing rule book - her rule book, as it happens - and began thinking anew about what women really want, or more precisely, how to make women want what he had to offer. Here is a man German by birth (originally Lagerfelt), who spoke English and French by the age of four, asked for a valet at six, and left home at 16 to live in Paris and study design, unsupported by his Swedish industrialist father. An apprenticeship with Balmain, three fashion directorships (with Patou, Fendi, Chloé), his own-label stores and literally hundreds of collections for the house of Chanel later, Karl Lagerfeld is the master of all he surveys. No one else can match not only his prodigious output but also his uncanny knack of twisting and playing with fashion’s conventions, producing designs that are ultimate objects of desire.
Lagerfeld darts over. His movements are almost balletic, his posture military in its correctness. “You’d better just talk with Amanda,” he says, seeing us chatting. “I have nothing to say!”
As he takes a seat beside me, the British and French PRs emit audible sighs of relief and the buzz in the crowded room surges again. I haven’t seen Lagerfeld up close for a number of years and the difference is remarkable. The man who once said he felt embalmed in fat is slim as a reed and sharply dressed in black cigarette pants, block-toed boots, a white high-collared shirt and a black teddy-boy tie. Biker-boy Chrome Hearts necklaces swing like half-eaten bunches of grapes from his neck, and his hands, half-hidden by black, fingerless gloves, are heavy with silver Gothic rings. The grey hair, heavily powdered, is neatly coiffed into a ponytail, and those trademark black sunglasses create the impression of talking to someone through a sealed glass screen.
So has he made many changes during fittings? “Oh no,” he says in his heavily accented English. “So far, only one skirt - it was too heavy. When I make a dress at this price,” he continues, “I have to see if it works at the first fitting. I will be throwing a fortune out of the window for nothing if I do not get it right - and all because I was too lazy to think what I was doing.”
Lagerfeld is a tough taskmaster with those around him, but even more tough with himself. After dreaming about a collection, he wakes up and draws it. Did he do this as a child, I wonder. “Oh yes,” he says, reaching forward and sketching a hat with deft, impressive strokes and then passing it to an assistant. “But I draw much better now.” We talk about his mother: an aloof, well-educated, well-dressed woman who insisted that he speak quickly because “you may be a child, but I am not”. He still talks at a rate of knots that would baffle even a UN interpreter. “My mother was very influential, but now I have to be careful not to look like her. Thank God I don’t do Chanel for men, otherwise I really would look like her.” I mention that it’s a common problem for all of us, but then realise that it’s generally a problem shared by daughters and not by sons.
We speak about his appearance - it’s hard not to when in the flesh he is so transformed. He has said he lost weight to be a “clothes horse”. The severity of his regime has robbed him of a passion for food. “I only eat what I must.” He leans forward and taps my tape-recorder, saying, “This could be a piece of chocolate for all I care, it has no effect at all.” He never eats fats or sugar, never drinks (except Diet Coke, coffee and litres of water) and never steps on the scales. “You can tell when you put on weight, because your clothes get tighter. You wear baggy clothes, you get baggy. Tight is…” Lagerfeld pauses and thinks for a moment his words hanging expectantly in the air. A few moments pass. This is uncharacteristic, because Lagerfeld never seems lost for words. Suddenly Harlech’s voice chimes in “Right!” she says excitedly. “Tight is right!” Lagerfeld sits back in his chair and beams. “Exactly,” he says, looking delighted. Another model enters, obviously a favourite. “Ah,” says Karl, rising from the table with the beaming smile remaining. “Ça va?”
“You know,” says Lagerfeld, returning to the table, “I don’t do any exercise - exercise makes me bulky. That is strange, no?” When I counter that he must have excessive testosterone in his system, he looks perplexed. “Well, my doctor never told me that.” Lagerfeld is not difficult to read. Say something that he doesn’t like and he will ignore the question or, worse still, accuse you of being boring. Being boring is the greatest indictment Lagerfeld can bring to bear. When I mention the word luxury, he swivels his head and fixes me with the dark glare of his sunglasses. “Luxury is pieces of expensive goodies bought by nobodies who don’t have a luxury life. It means nothing.” When he gets up to analyse the cut of a jacket, Harlech offers a whispered explanation. “So many journalists have asked this question, Karl has grown tired of answering.” Lagerfeld’s displeasure is legendary. Friends who are disloyal (the greatest personal crime) get frozen out. Worse still, those in the workplace whom he doesn’t approve are ignored and excluded. Recently, when the accessories designer Frances Stein, who is responsible for many of Chanel’s successful bags and the signature balleriné pump, retired, Lagerfeld, who was notoriously not a fan, gave a quote to the American magazine W. “Apparently as gifted as she was, she was also very difficult - to say it nicely.” When Ines de la Fressange, the face of Chanel for many years, and once unforgettably described as a “whippet wearing make-up” displeased not only Lagerfeld but Chanel’s owner, Mr Wertheimer, Lagerfeld fired her unceremoniously. “She had a bad attitude,” he said by way of explanation.
Rather endearingly, he is still excited by clothes. He creates 13 collections a year, counting Fendi and Lagerfeld Gallery (his own line) so he could be forgiven for fashion ennui. “Oh yes, I love clothes. For me I like those that are a uniform. I am my own liftboy.” He chuckles at his joke. But when I comment that his clothes are a reflection of his discipline, he stops laughing and glares. “I don’t have to be disciplined. It comes with the territory. It is in my nature. I am very puritan.” So does he think a puritan streak is necessary to be successful? Another glare. “I don’t question what other people do. About them I do not care.”
He doesn’t look back, either. “I’m short-term. Even with technical expertise in fashion - it’s a backbone, but you should always forget what you have done - it helps to create a better collection next time.” Despite his severity, he has a sense of humour. When I ask what he thinks about fashion’s future, he looks amused. “Darling,” he says. “I am not a fortune-teller, I am a fashion tailor!” There have been many references throughout his collections to religion, from crucifixes to cassocks. Harlech says he can often be monastic, but Lagerfeld protests he is not religious. “When I was young, someone told my mother I would be a priest. She hated the idea, so she never let me go to church.” His mother is buried in the grounds of a private chapel at a house Lagerfeld inherited from her in Brittany. Also buried there is his closest friend Jacques de Bascher, who died of Aids in 1989. “Maybe there is one person in life for you and that’s all,” he told Vanity Fair in 1992. Death, just as life, holds no fear for him: “I got used to the idea; it’s a final social justice.”
The future excites him, though. He says he would never live in Germany again because “it is a country with a past. If you have no past you have a better chance of a future.” Is that why he is keen on Australia? He recently guest-edited an issue of Australian Vogue and chose Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann - both Aussies - to star in and direct his Chanel No 5 commercial. “I liked Australia. Yes, it has no past. We have friends there. I like the editor of Australian Vogue. She is not dowdy. If an editor is dowdy then I do not like the magazine.” In the issue he submitted to being interviewed at length by Luhrmann, who seems to have many of Karl’s traits - an exacting attention to detail, a will to succeed and a boundless curiosity. Lagerfeld smiles. “Yes, there are things that are similar. But he is younger than me. He still cares. I do not.”
In fact there are things that Lagerfeld is passionate about - his books (he owns hundreds of thousands) and his photography. He frequently photographs the Chanel advertising campaigns. He owns a bookshop called 7L at 7 rue de Lille and publishes books via Steidl (a German publisher). “I want to read everything, to see everything, to be informed. I am a paper addict, a paper freak, a paper-worm.” Curiously for a man who is future-focused, he reads mainly about the past. He tells me he is reading a book about “the life of armies in Greek history, 200 years before Jesus Christ”.
Back to the future, a deal has recently been signed between Lagerfeld and Tommy Hilfiger, the American clothing giant, for Hilfiger to use the Lagerfeld Gallery name. “I am not a business man; being an accountant would bore me to death. The business became bigger. I wanted someone to take over the merchandising, the distribution and so on.” He knew Hilfiger beforehand. “I liked him, yes. I would be bored to do what he does, but what he does he does very well.” The move follows Lagerfeld’s first foray into the lower end of the market. The collection that he created with high- street darlings H&M was so successful that it sold out in a matter of hours around the world. “Yes, I have discovered that I can do something…” he pauses and tries out a word, “cheap”. He shakes his head and the Chrome Hearts jewellery round his neck jangles. “No, no! Do not say the word cheap. I hate the word cheap. It is…inexpensive. Yes, I can do something with the inexpensive end of the market. Hilfiger sells lipsticks for around $12, so I could make a little top for that, too.”
So is he finally ready to take on America? He’s already murmuring about buying a house on the West Coast. “Before, it was not the right time. Now I have more friends in America than I do here [in Paris]. I like it very much.” He could also make a great deal more money. As any fashion analyst will tell you, what American fashion lacks (and has always lacked) is excitement and drama. Americans thrill to eccentricity, but more than that they thrill to genius. Lagerfeld has both. “Fashion is all about energy,” he says of his new project. “Never get bored, never look back.” I wonder, in that case, how he feels about the politics across the pond right now? He looks at me as if I am mad. “Pah! You can ask that question but there is no answer, because I do not need a leader to tell me what to wear.” And what of France and those millions of chic French women - would he leave all that behind? “Well, no, I would not, but I’m not sure the French Chic still exists. All over the world, women dress the same - some dress well, some do not. But you know the thing about France?” asks Lagerfeld, thoughtfully looking down his studio towards a new model as she enters the room. “The position of France is no longer what it was in the world. I am sorry to say that, but it is true.”
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