Kaiser Karl – the fashion juggernaut that is Karl Lagerfeld – is late. Three hours late. His publicist asked me not to mention this, because apparently everyone says it, and it makes him seem grand. “Karl is not a snob,” she tells me, as we wait. “Karl has time for everyone, he is very generous, you will see.”
Later, after spending most of the afternoon in his company, I will see. But right now, the grandeur seems undeniable. We are inside his photographic studio in central Paris – his idea because, in between designing couture and ready-to-wear for Chanel, Fendi and his own Karl Lagerfeld brand, which have joint annual revenues of around £3 billion, he is a keen photographer. And even keener to be taken seriously in this medium.
The studio is testament to that. It’s the size of a tennis court. A sofa that seats 30 extends along two walls; there are two high umpire chairs, the type you normally see on Centre Court at Wimbledon, allowing Lagerfeld to direct his six full-time studio assistants. Out back, there is a room for state-of-the-art computers, printers and scanners; one crammed with cameras and lights; and another lined with desks and mirrors for hair and make-up. There are even two beds with pristine white cotton sheets and fluffy pillows, in case jet-lagged models need to take a nap. But the most impressive feature has to be the 60,000-odd books that cover the 18ft-high walls of the main studio, providing both a colourful backdrop and a weighty intellectual air.
I hear Lagerfeld before I see him: a deep Teutonic drone that always sounds calm and in control. “I never lose my temper,” he will say.
“I have other ways of doing things.” He glides in looking relaxed, wearing a black suit jacket by Tom Ford, black jeans by Christian Dior, a 4in-high Edwardian collar, and fingerless biker gloves adorned with rings. He offers a gloved hand and a well-practised apology, and takes a seat at a large wooden table in a room attached to the main studio, surrounded by sleek filing cabinets, yet more books and stacks of hip fashion and design magazines.
“I’m mad for books,” he says, sitting motionless behind his black Dior shades. “It is a disease I won’t recover from. They are the tragedy of my life. I want to learn about everything. I want to know everything, but I’m not an intellectual, and I don’t like their company. I’m the most superficial man on Earth.”
Lagerfeld relishes such contradictory language – or should I say, he relishes talking rubbish, probably because it makes understanding him more difficult and shields his private life. “There are many Karls,” says the publicist Caroline Lebar, who has known him for 22 years. “He is like – how do you say in English – the animal that changes its skin?” A snake? “No, a snake changes only once in life.” A chameleon? “Oui, oui. Karl is like a chameleon. Always changing.”
The previous day, I joined the world’s most powerful fashion editors and a splash of high-net-worth women underneath the giant glass dome of Paris’s Grand Palais. We were there to watch “Karl the fashion designer” present his latest haute couture collection for Chanel. The atmosphere was heady, and when Lagerfeld finally appeared, there was loud applause. This was Lagerfeld as the world knows him: a human waxwork in a powdered ponytail, who pouts in front of the camera, and teeters along with energetic ballerina-like steps on the balls of his feet. “I buy my shoes a size too small,” he says. “I like the way it feels.”
He has become iconic, a kind of caricature and torchbearer for fashion. He’s also influential, if you believe Time magazine, which this year named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Not bad for a dressmaker. He has had a great career.
“Career, what career?” he asks, still sitting motionless behind his shades. “What does it mean – career? Everything I do is my passion. Everything is connected.”
He can be a playful yet prickly character. While he was fielding questions after the Chanel show, he asked one bewildered correspondent to leave for no apparent reason. What happened?
“I have no problem with journalists – many are friends,” he says. “Only if they are really stupid, or if they’ve got bad breath, or if they smell. Yesterday I had a problem. I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve got to tell this woman that she needs to be taken away. Her smell is not possible.’ ”
Today Lagerfeld wants to show me a few things – evidence of the “many Karls”. He reaches for a glossy magazine that features his illustrations. Karl the illustrator casually flicks through, pointing as he goes along. “See, I can draw, no? Look, good, no? And here, and here.”
He is sipping chilled Pepsi Max incessantly. Does the caffeine explain why he talks so quickly? “No, with the stupid things I say I can’t take my time,” he says, reaching for a four-volume photographic book titled Metamorphoses of an American, showcasing thousands of portraits of the male model Brad Kroenig, who, thanks to Lagerfeld, is now the most sought-after male model in the world.
“It shows Brad’s physical and emotional development over time,” explains Lagerfeld the Photographer, pointing to the first photograph, taken when Kroenig was 23, and then to the last, taken when he was 28, earlier this year – though I struggle to notice any real metamorphosis between the two images before me.
Lagerfeld discovered Kroenig at a casting and since then has observed his emotional and physical development through his lens, month by month, all over the world. To spice things up, Lagerfeld would choose literary and cultural references for Kroenig to interpret: so we see him as James Dean, Rudolph Valentino, Lieutenant Pinkerton from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. “Divine, no?” gushes Lagerfeld.
“He has a gift for the camera.”
This passion for photography started in 1987, when he began shooting Chanel’s press kits and catalogues. He now shoots fine art, fashion editorials, advertising campaigns. He recently shot 50 film stars in the studio for Madame Figaro, including Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman and Catherine Deneuve. He particularly likes architectural photography, and currently has an exhibition inside the Palace of Versailles – grainy black-and-white images printed on a rare denim-like paper. There is a nostalgic tone to his portraiture, the considered composition and the way his subjects seem removed from the process: the smoke and mirrors of mood, image and style. He is inspired mostly by photographers from the early 20th century, those he calls the “pictorialists” who made photography a new art form: Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Irving Penn. “I don’t always like Helmut Newton’s subjects, but I like his technique, his eye, his attitude, and as a person he was really fine.”
What is his own eye like? “I have no perspective, I just like to do.” Your personality must come through in the photographs you take, though? “Sure, but I like to change, to hide, to play games, to use different techniques.”
He acknowledges that his photography will always be dwarfed by his reputation in fashion, but this does not stymie his enthusiasm. He now devotes more than half his time to it, often shooting well into the night, despite also having to design a total of 24 collections a year for the houses of Chanel, Fendi, and his eponymous line, Karl Lagerfeld – an extraordinary workload for a 69-year-old, when you consider that most fashion designers do just four collections a year.
He has other interests as well. A representative from the makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto interrupts at one point – Lagerfeld’s rapid Franco-German commentary will be heard on one of the game’s radio stations – and he has just been asked to design 80 luxurious villas on Isla Moda (“Fashion Island”) in Dubai.
“They sent a private jet,” he says. “I said, ‘It’s too small. I need a bigger plane.’ It’s fun, no?”
Where does he find all the energy? “Energy is like breathing for me. I don’t even think about it.” What if he had to choose between fashion and photography? “I would rather commit suicide than have to choose between them. What can force me to be one? I like to be all. The different aspects make the one man.”
Clues to Lagerfeld’s complex character can be found in his childhood. He was brought up on a 12,000-acre estate in northern Germany during the war years. His father was a wealthy businessman who introduced condensed milk to Germany (he was 63 when Lagerfeld was born). His mother was free-spirited, stylish and harsh. Lagerfeld recalls he was not allowed to chatter on when talking to her and had to be quick, the reason why he now talks so fast. “ ‘You may be six years old, but I am not,’ she used to say.” She refused to let him wear glasses although he was short-sighted, saying: “Children with glasses are the ugliest thing in the world.” She also took little interest in his schooling, never attending a parent-teacher evening. Nor did she ever attend one of his fashion shows later in life, despite his success. “She said, ‘Well, I didn’t go to your father’s office either,’ ” he laughs.
And yet Lagerfeld still admired her and knew how to please her, unlike his two older sisters, who were sent away to boarding school. “I found out that if I didn’t create trouble, I could do what I wanted.” Did he not like the idea of boarding school? He screws his face up in disgust. “It was out of the question. I hated the idea of being in a dormitory with other people. No, no, no,” he says, hitting the table as he speaks. “My sisters were sent away because my mother thought they were boring. I was not boring.”
Lagerfeld took an early interest in fashion, which his mother shared. He enjoyed snipping pictures from her fashion magazines, and criticising the way his classmates dressed. To differentiate himself, he chose to wear his hair long and Austrian-style clothes, because nobody in northern Germany had them. His mother accepted his homosexuality, which was clear from a young age. “I always wanted to be different,” he says. “I never wanted to be like the others.” Why? “That’s a big question. I’m like a cuckoo in a nest. I was different, and I wanted to be different. I had only one big idea, and that was to get out of there. Not because I was unhappy, because my parents were absolutely divine. But I hated the people in the class. I didn’t like to play with children. I only wanted to read, sketch, write, and to learn languages.” Languages, he points out, expanded his horizons beyond rural Germany. “I taught myself to speak French and English by the age of six, before I started school.”
Lagerfeld is now an information junkie. He owns a bookshop in Paris; an imprint of the German publishing house Steidl, which has produced all 35 of his photographic books; and he has a personal collection of about 300,000 books spread across his three homes in Paris, New York and Monaco, as well as here in the studio. They fill nearly all his rooms. “I have only books, I have no art because there is no space for anything else,” he says. History is a favourite subject, and biographies. “I’m interested in other lives, especially lives I haven’t known,” he says, nodding to the fact that he has met many of the late 20th century’s biggest figures. Why this obsessive need for information? He shrugs his shoulders, purses his lips, then tells a story from his childhood: when his uncle (“I adored him, he was the chicest man I ever knew”) took him for a walk, Lagerfeld failed to recognise the name of a minor German poet on a street sign.
“I was 10 and he slapped me in the face. I had never been slapped in the face by anybody. When we returned to the house, my uncle shouted at my mother, ‘Your son is as shallow and superficial as you!’ I will never forget that.”
If his uncle ignited his interest in books, his mother’s keen sense of style fostered his interested in fashion. He moved to Paris to study at 15; two years later he entered an international design competition and won in the coat category – Yves Saint Laurent won for a cocktail dress in the same year. Lagerfeld was immediately hired as a junior assistant at the haute couture house Pierre Balmain, and soon became chief assistant.
But it was the 1960s and fashion was changing. Younger people began looking to street fashion rather than haute couture for direction. Sensing this tide change, Lagerfeld recast himself as an imaginative ready-to-wear designer, and was soon translating street trends for the catwalk, at labels such as Krizia, Ballantyne, Charles Jourdan, Mario Valentino, Fendi and Chloé. “Fashion is something that reflects the life and times we live in,” he explains. “I like to watch the world – and what’s going on. I find it exciting. The worst thing is when friends say, ‘Remember the good old days?’ Forget about the good old days! That just makes your present second-hand. What is interesting is now. If you think it was better before, then you might as well commit suicide immediately.” He injected this outlook into Chanel, which he took over in 1982, and which had been moribund since Coco’s death in 1971.
“Respect is not creative,” he told American Vogue. “Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore – and then you get something out of her.”
He sexed up Chanel by shrinking the signature suit into a micro-mini and a midriff-baring jacket, and covered it with Chanel logos. He introduced sequined hot pants and giant hip-hop-style neck chains. He made a stuffy label into one desired by the new, young, trendy and moneyed set. Some in the fashion press said it was “overkill” and “crass sensationalism”. But revenues at Chanel told a different story, and other established fashion houses followed his brave lead, one wholesale revival after another: Tom Ford at Gucci, John Galliano at Christian Dior, Christopher Bailey at Burberry, Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga.
Lagerfeld says he is not bothered by criticism, that when you’ve been around as long as him you develop a thick skin. “I do what I like, so they can say what they like.” Even so, you would not want to cross him. “My mentality has a touch of the professional killer,” he says chillingly. “I’m like a mercenary, hired to kill.” On your sketchbook, or people? “Both. I never start, but I love revenge.” Served hot or cold? “Ice-cold.” Revenge against whom? “No, I don’t say, but they know.” I’m a little surprised. His colleagues have all told me he’s the nicest guy. “Yes, I’m the nicest person in the world, but I know how to react. I’m often indifferent as well,” he says. “Often things aren’t that important. I’m not that important either. I don’t take myself too seriously.”
Nowadays, Lagerfeld is a law unto himself, designing with virtual impunity. He creates most of his sketches in the morning, in his enormous two-storey apartment that overlooks the Seine, working while listening to a vast array of music on one of his of 100-odd iPod Nanos, wearing a white Edwardian-style smock, because it stops his clothes getting dirty from the Shu Uemura eye shadow he uses to create his illustrations. Everything is geared around making him feel as spontaneous and inspired as possible: his flexible approach to time, for example, and the way he avoids using words such as “meetings”. “Meetings sound like business, and I’m definitely not a businessman. I don’t need meetings. I’m only interested in my own opinion anyway. If I have a project, like this,” he says, pointing to an advertising campaign he recently shot for Dom Pérignon, “you like, or you don’t like. There is no second opinion. If you’re not 100% sure about what I want to do, you ask someone else.”
Is he still passionate about design? “Of course there’s passion, but passion doesn’t mean that you have to be satisfied. I always think the next step will be better. I’m in a permanent bad mood with myself, thinking I could always do better, that there is more. It’s like there is this glass wall, and I can’t get through to the other side.” But he adds, raising an exclamatory finger: “I’m not one of those people who think they’re more artistic than their profession. Come on. You’re selling things that make people happy, not difficult pregnancies. I can’t stand designers who talk about their work being art.”
Lagerfeld’s life was turned upside-down in 1989 when he lost one of his closest friends, the French aristocrat Jacques de Bascher, to Aids.
He refuses to expand or dwell. “Life goes on, everything changes, everything. That’s normal, because you didn’t expect events to turn out like this.” Does he believe in life after death? “No, no. To me death is Shelley’s famous line: to wake up from ‘the dream of life’.” Isn’t that the same thing? “Yes, but I wait for the surprise. Everything changes, except death. Billions have died before us, so it can’t be that bad. If you ask me, death and deep sleep are the same thing. And then you don’t take yourself too seriously.” He takes a considered sip of his drink before adding: “Oh, please. Don’t over-react to how I am talking. Try to keep all this abstract, huh?”
Discussion about “the hidden depths”, as he calls them, should be avoided. “The quest to find yourself is an overrated thing concerning not very interesting people very often. Psychoanalysis – I don’t want to hear about it. Before Freud, people weren’t tortured by these things that have undermined the territory of perception. You have to live with your shortcomings.”
I’m just trying to get behind the many faces of Karl, I suggest. He laughs.
“This reminds me of when Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vanity Fair. I didn’t know her very well then, and she said, ‘I have to spend three days with you to see what’s behind.’ And I said, ‘Annie, you’re wasting your time. Look at what you see.’ ” He casts his hand theatrically over his face. “There is nothing else.” Why do you want to be known as superficial? “I like that image. I don’t want to look like an old teacher.
I never make serious conversation. It bores me to death. I hate that. I love knowledge for myself, but I don’t care what other people think. No, fashion, which has the worst reputation in the world, suits me very well.”
When he puts on his calf-skinned gloves and his many rings in the morning, he is not accessorising, he is getting ready for his act. He understands the seamless link that now exists between fashion and celebrity. Or as Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld’s muse and close assistant for the past 12 years, 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 actually a very gentle, subtle man.”
“For me, identity is a private, intimate problem,” says Lagerfeld. “Fashion doesn’t have to be your identity. Who cares what people think? As long as you agree with yourself, that’s enough, no? I judge nobody. I laugh about myself. That I can do; I know myself pretty well.”
With that, Lagerfeld almost bows in thanks, and glides away. He is making arrangements for a party in the private apartment upstairs. Karl the Party Animal. But that’s another story.
Don't give up the day job
Does Lagerfeld cut it as a photographer? Monica Allende, picture editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, gives her verdict
Karl Lagerfeld’s passion for photography is undeniable. And much of his work has been well received: in 1996 he won the German Photography Society’s culture prize; last year he received the ICP Trustees Award at New York’s Infinity Awards, for “pioneering contributions to the use of photographic images throughout his career”.
Lagerfeld refuses to rate himself as a photographer: “I don’t judge it. I’m never happy – that’s why I continue.” So what does his latest project reveal? Metamorphoses aims to be an intimate portrait of the model Brad Kroenig. But the images are repetitive, soulless, and we never glimpse the person behind the face. There is no intimacy and little technical mastery. The project echoes a similar undertaking by the portraitist and fashion photographer Bruce Weber (who followed his muse, Peter Johnson, for three years), but lacks its innovation and freshness.
Kaiser Karl is undoubtedly a fashion genius. But a photographic great? Wisely, he has never tried to claim that title.
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