Karl Lagerfeld did not disappoint. For his spring-summer collection for Chanel, he sent out sequined jackets over biker pants, short-skirted suits in screaming tangerine and dozens of sellable, swinging shapes fluttering over sleek silhouettes. As models wearing classic Chanel jackets tarted up with huge plastic camellias sauntered down the runway, a mix of Mozart and Dixieland jazz blared from the loudspeakers. It was vintage Lagerfeld-an irreverent combination of the classics, jazz and a pinch of bad taste.
By the time it was over, the verdict was in: Lagerfeld had once again managed to spin his cloth into gold for Chanel. Like the show for his own Karl Lagerfeld collection earlier in the week, the designs were a triumph. He had produced both lines (and a third for Fendi which he showed in Milan a week earlier) and imbued each with a fresh and distinct personality. “He’s a one-man band,” says Lynn Manulis, president of Marthain New York and Palm Beach. “And he knows how to play all the instruments.”
First prize: Lagerfeld’s admirers call him a renaissance man. His detractors call him a computer. He has called himself, with characteristic immodesty and humor, “a one-man multinational company,” or “a style bureau.” The one word he deliberately avoids is artist. “I think I have a limited talent,” he says. “Limited, because I’m not Van Gogh, you know.” Certainly, that’s true. But no fashion designer is more haute for his customers and hot for his imitators.
Lagerfeld, 52, had the luck to be born rich to indulgent, loving parents. His father was a Swedish-German industrialist who owned the European licenses of Carnation condensed milk. His mother wore couture clothes and encouraged him to pursue his interest in art. He was raised in a castle north of Hamburg, where he was largely sheltered from the deprivations of the war. “I don’t remember when I wasn’t sketching,” he says. “I think I was born with a pen in my hand. But I was usually sketching costumes.” His parents gave him a subscription to Paris Vogue and, when he was 14, sent him off to Paris to study fashion. Two years later, at the age of 16, Lagerfeld entered a fashion competition and won first prize for coats. First prize for dresses that year was won by another teenager, a high-strung, gentle boy from Algeria named Yves Saint Laurent.
Lagerfeld’s phenomenal success in taking" a classic name and making it the brand of choice for a new generation remains his greatest achievement. He has been designing for Fendi since 1964, creating luxuriously eccentric furs and casual ready-to-wear. He took over as designer for Chanel in 1982, reviving the moribund house of one of France’s most revered fashion icons. Six years ago, he launched his own experimental collection, Karl Lagerfeld, and a secondary, lower-priced line called KL. Surprisingly, he manages to give each collection a distinct look.
“In a way, it’s easy,” Lagerfeld explains. “For KL, I just have to ask myself what I like. For Chanel, I have to work within the structure of the Chanel tradition, like an actor bringing his own style to a part. And for Fendi, I try to think how I would design if I were an Italian.”
Tortoise-shell fan: If Lagerfeld were an Italian, he wouldn’t be Lagerfeld. He is extremely fastidious and disciplined. He wakes early, working every morning in a freshly cleaned, crisp white robe.“I feel German in taste and discipline,” he says. “My mother was very Prussian, not in that horrible Nazi sense, but very civilized.” Most mornings, he dons his uniform–a three-piece Comme des Garcons suit and custommade shirt. His steel-gray hair is always pulled into his trademark ponytail. And like many fashion trendies, he hides behind dark sunglasses even at night. But not because he is shy.
Lagerfeld is a press agent’s dream. He drives a flashy Bentley. He peeks coquettishly at photographers over the top of a tortoise-shell fan. He has a very sharp I tongue, and he adores promotion-of himself. He is almost hyperactive, his hands fluttering wildly as he speaks. He leaps from project to project and from home to lavish home (he owns seven magnificent houses in France, Italy, Germany and Monte Carlo, each decorated in a different style). He fears only boredom, repetition and stagnation.
He says he reads five newspapers a day (in English, French, German and Italian) and the best modern novels; he loves popular music and movies. He draws his inspiration from whatever’s in the air, and believes in interpreting the culture of the street to create a modern, youthful look. “I take ideas from wherever they are but I use them my way,” he says with his usual self-confidence. “Any designer who refuses to look at the street is an idiot. That’s where ideas are coming from for the last 20 years.”
Make no mistake about it: these pearls of wisdom do not come from a universally beloved man. His critics say he is ruthless in his relationships, an opportunist who uses the people around him and then discards them when they no longer serve his purposes. They mention his public fight with Kitty D’Alessio, the former president of Chanel, and his break with his longtime friend, muse and favorite model, Ines de la Fressange. Lagerfeld admits that he is a tough man to cross. He says his agreement with Alain Wertheimer, the 41-year-old chairman of Chanel, specified that Lagerfeld would make all design and image decisions. “I made a deal with Mr. Wertheimer like Faust’s deal with the Devil,” Lagerfeld says. (He doesn’t leave much doubt who the Devil is: “It’s not Mr. Wertheimer,” he admits.) D’Alessio, he claims, challenged his authority. She is now working in New York. “They say she’s the director of special projects,” Lagerfeld snipes. “But we have no special projects.”
He fired Ines de la Fressange when she accepted an honorific appointment as the symbol of France in spite of Lagerfeld’s protest that the position wasn’t good for Chanel’s image. (Though Chanel’s image has not exactly been well served by the ad campaigns full of changing faces that have replaced the Fressange series.) Now Lagerfeld says she was getting lazy and asking for too much money. “She was getting too big for her little brain,” he explains. “I’m not mean, but I see things one way and that’s how I want to do it. If someone insists on doing it differently, they certainly will not last long at Chanel. I do not lose. I win.”
So do his fashions. Lagerfeld has radically changed the proportions of women’s clothes. This year, in his own line, he practically eliminated the perennial problem of the hemline by turning dresses, jackets and blouses into mid-thigh-length tops, slipped over leggings. “I think in pieces,” he says. “Call them dresses, call them jackets, I don’t care what you call them, just wear them correctly.” The new shapes will be widely copied on Seventh Avenue.
Not even Lagerfeld is sure how his commercial magic works. He has been accused by fashion purists of lacking an artistic vision-the sort of vision that so clearly defines a romantic like Romeo Gigli. Lagerfeld isn’t the best designer showing in Paris. Christian Lacroix is better with prints. Yves Saint Laurent is more refined. Jean Paul Gaultier is more experimental; Claude Montana more futuristic. But none combine all those attributes in exactly the way Lagerfeld does.
His head for business is almost as sharp as his scissors. He’s cut deals as faultlessly as he cuts his pleated tunics. He earns millions of dollars each year from his three design lines and from the Lagerfeld perfumes. He was recently asked to revive the house of Norman Norell, the American designer who died in 1972. Asked if he would consider such a project, he pauses. “It would be fun to do something in America,” he says. “But only if they have enough money-and know what they’re doing.”
Lagerfeld is confident of his own course. Because he sees himself as a work in progress, he has refused to allow retrospective exhibits of his designs. “I have this pretentious idea,” he says, “that I still have my most important work ahead of me.” Like the late Coco Chanel, he doesn’t mind being copied. “I’ll worry when they stop copying me,” he says. It’s not likely to happen soon.
