How does it feel to be called the most prolific fashion designer in the world?
The most copied?
The most influential?
Karl Lagerfeld-the designer who churns out all those megabucks Chanel jackets, bangles, beads, belts and boots that are knocked off even before the originals hit the stores, the designer who sends tremors through the fashion industry every time he lowers or raises hems, every time he slits or shreds a skirt-says ever so matter-of-factly, “That’s OK that people say that. I’m pleased they think it.
“But their words don’t make the next collection.”
He puts down his fan, takes a sip of his Diet Coke, and he’s off in his rat-a-tat-tat style: “There is always another collection to do. I like what is ahead. I like to change. I like to destroy and do something else. What is done is done. There is no looking back. It is always what is next. Today and tomorrow. I love fashion. I like the idea that fashion is the mood of the moment. What I love about fashion is that nothing is final. We’re talking of dresses, not buildings. It isn’t all that dramatic. Hmmmmmm?”
Karl Lagerfeld-he of myriad talents and multiple homes, enormous wealth and insatiable cerebral appetites-speaks with flourish, with emphasis and with supreme confidence, yet he ends every torrent of thoughts with a lingering “Hmmmmmm?” Or a brief “Eh?” Or perhaps “It is amusing, no?” Or, preferably not, “It is not amusing, no?”
He tacks on those queries as though he is looking for agreement, for approbation. In reality, the lilting “hmmmms” are part of his persona, just as his graying ponytail and his tinted glasses, his black Japanese suits and his ever-present fans are part of the image he has created.
Karl Lagerfeld-who is indeed the most influential fashion designer anywhere-looks to no one for approval or agreement. Not to the people who own the companies he designs for, not to the people who write about, buy, copy or even wear the clothes he designs.
“I propose. They like it or not. That is not my problem,” he says.
And, so, when Lagerfeld puts his designs and his reputation on the line this week as the showings of next spring’s fashions get underway in Paris, he will walk down the runway at the end of each of those shows-on Monday, on Tuesday and again on Thursday-as he has done for the past 30 years: Briskly, with a nod and a small smile and totally self-assured. No reason to be otherwise.
German-born Karl Lagerfeld, 55, has been designing since he was 16 and has been a significant fashion force since 1963 when he first started designing Chloe. He currently is fashion’s triple threat, designing for a trio of prestigious Paris houses, each with its own style and personality: He creates couture (custom-made) and ready-to-wear collections for Chanel, as well as ready-to-wear for both Chloe and for Karl Lagerfeld, a line that bears his name but that he does not own. But he also does furs and clothes for Rome-based Fendi; menswear; a women’s line made just for the German market, another for Japan and only he knows how many others.
But it is the French lines, particularly anything he does for Chanel, that have worldwide impact on what women wear. When he put his models in micro-minis during his fall couture show in Paris last July, it was akin to sending up a red flag to every manufacturer, retailer and designer around the globe. Mon Dieu! Minis from Lagerfeld-the man who started the long-skirt flap in ’92 when he banished them by whispering for all the world to hear: “Short skirts are for middle-aged women.”
After the couture show, some stores, like New York’s Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, jumped on the short bandwagon and got micros in stock as soon as they could get their moderately priced manufacturer allies to produce them.
“He is that powerful,” says Bloomingdale’s senior vice president in charge of fashion direction Kal Ruttenstein. “If he hikes skirts, I think much of the world will follow.”
“Every time I see a woman wearing a sheer skirt, every time I see a white shirt with dangling cuffs, I think of Karl,” says Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director for Neiman Marcus stores, alluding to two current fashion trends introduced by Lagerfeld, then copied or reinvented by others in every possible color, fabric and price.
Kaner could have added: Leather biker jackets and lug-soled boots, chain belts and chain-handled quilted bags or quilted anything, oversized pearls and car-wash skirts and platforms and a host of other Lagerfeld creations, including the idea of wearing a jacket over tights; that concept, considered outrageous when he first showed it, was the precursor of what has become the most prevalent street fashion of the last five years.
But fashion is not his only outlet. He’s a photographer: He shoots the publicity and advertising photos for all his major lines; he’s done editorial photography for Interview, Vogue and other magazines; he has exhibited in galleries and art shows. He has illustrated books, the most recent being “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He’s designed wallpaper and fabrics and decorated all seven of his homes and calls himself a frustrated interior designer.
How does he do it?
“I’m an organized man. I like what I do, and I do nothing else. I don’t take holidays. I have no family. So I have nothing else to do. I read. I must read-to be informed. There are zillions of books I want to read. I sketch. I paint. I get tapes of movies, videos very quickly. I zip through things a lot.
“I am alone, but I am never bored. My work entertains me. Reading entertains me. Photography excites me. I am a voyeur. I watch everything. And I am thinking all the time. You have to be that way. You have to think of what you are doing 24 hours a day and whatever you look at you look at and you think, `How can I use that?’-even if it has nothing to do with what you are doing. The secret is paying attention 24 hours a day.
“And I have a very clear head. It is not a messy place.”
He is sitting at a small table in the ballroom-sized grand salon of his magnificent home built in 1706 on the rue de l’Universite in Paris, a room that he restored to perfection. With ceilings 18-feet high and decorated with gold leaf, the room is filled with large mirrors, bronzes, prized 18th Century furniture, including chairs covered in vivid yellow or deep rose. It is a room also filled with innumerable vases of perfect, full-blown roses, as well as the fragrance from perfumed candles-heliotrope and cinnamon-because “the scent of flowers is not enough.”
Though his official residence is in Monaco, this is the home where he lives, admittedly, a rather solitary life and works much of the time.
He’s up at dawn, writing letters (hates the phone, loves to fax) and sketching. Afternoon on through evening are for visits to the ateliers and for appointments, for which he is chronically late.
He claims he has tired of night life, finds it boring, and anything boring is anathema in his life. He reads-poetry, biographies, history, “also trash and not trash”-late into the night in French, German, English, Italian. He cannot remember a time when he was not like this, when he was not sketching, reading, “when I did not like costumes, clothes.”
He was born in Hamburg in 1938 into wealth (condensed milk) to a Swedish father who was 60 and German mother who was 42. “They were more like my grandparents.” They were the biggest influence on his life “because they permitted me to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. My mother was a very, very spoiled woman and very lazy. Her children, her husband, her lover did everything for her. I learned very early that as long as I wasn’t boring or bothering my parents with problems, it was OK. I did things to make them happy. I knew what they wanted, and I knew what they hated. It was perfect for me.”
At 4, he asked for a valet. “At 5, I wanted my own French teacher. When my French was perfect, I said I wanted to go to school in France and they let me go. When I wanted to be in fashion, my father said it was better to try something than to grow up frustrated and never know. I had an easy life and never had to fight for anything, but I started earning my own money at 16.”
He had entered a design contest in Paris, won for his coat sketch (the dress prize went to Yves Saint Laurent). That led to a job with Pierre Balmain, later Patou and then the first stint with Chloe from 1963 to 1983. He has been with Chanel since ’83, took on Chloe again in ’92 and has done Karl Lagerfeld lines (and other labels) for the last two decades.
“I would be bored to death if I could only do one collection,” he says. In his mind, they are so distinct, “they could be done by another person, yes?”
He calls the Lagerfeld-labeled line “really me. My taste. It is the German expression. Graphic.”
Chloe is “a French collection. It is my vision of what is feminine and what is very French.”
Chanel is “picking up the trends in the air and doing them the way Chanel would do them if Chanel were a trendy young woman of 25 living today.”
Ideas for his designs, he says, “come like a flash. I cannot explain it. I have this luck. I do things, and I don’t know how they came and suddenly they are there. It’s like somebody is doing my hands.
“If I go to Chanel, I know only that house exists. If you ask me about the others while I am at Chanel, I am blank. I can bleach my mind completely.”
He can do the same with the past. He keeps no archives, never looks back. “If somebody did a retrospective of my things, I would not go.”
His work, he says, “is pleasant. It is not like going to a factory. I am lucky to have servants, to have assistants everywhere.” But the ideas, he is quick to point out, “are always mine. I am not interested in others’ work. I have one vision, not two, not anybody else’s. I see it one way, and if it is not that way, I am not interested. Of course, nobody’s perfect. And I can make a mistake. And I am ready to say when I make a mistake.” Pause. “But that does not happen that often.”
Not every collection Lagerfeld designs is always a boffo winner. But he has far more successes than not, and Lagerfeld is the fashion power he is, retailers say, for a variety of reasons: He knows when to go for the new; he is a master at inventing new shapes, particularly for jackets; his wit is without peer in creating accessories and themes; he has a great sense of mixing fabrics and creating details. “And he just makes exciting clothes, great jackets,” says Ultimo’s president Joan Weinstein, who has carried Chloe and Lagerfeld oer the last 15 years.
For all that, he is said to be very well compensated, though Lagerfeld would never be crass enough to discuss finances. Women’s Wear Daily estimated that he was making $4 million in design fees in 1982-even before his Chanel contract.
He will only say: “I have never invested one cent of my money in any business. I take flat fees or percentages. I have nothing to do with the businesses-nothing, nothing, nothing! I want to be completely detached. I make no business decisions, only fashion decisions. I don’t want to hear boring business stories. Never, never, never!” And he slaps the table. “I just love doing the fashion.”
He gets reflective and says: “I am in an overprotected world and sometimes too far away from reality. I have lots of privileges. I live like somebody from another century. It might seem selfish, but if people want me to do what I’m doing, I have to live this way. And lots of people live from what I’m doing, have jobs because of what I do, so it’s OK. I don’t any have guilt feelings for what I do.”
So, are there things yet to be done?
“My dream would be to do another house. I don’t know where. I have all those houses and I rebuild them, redecorate them, redo them. I don’t need another one, but I would like to do a modern house.
“But I never look into the future. I only go from today to tomorrow. After that, I care nothing about.”
Another line?
“No, no. No, no, no. Please.”
