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Karl Lagerfeld, who reigned as fashion’s most famous and revered designer in a career spanning seven decades has died, Chanel confirmed in a statement on Tuesday. He was 85 years old.
Brilliant and endlessly quotable, the German-born designer not only revolutionised some of the industry’s most iconic brands, he changed the direction of fashion itself. His vision broadened fashion’s reach to span everything from celebrity to fine art and he injected an industry once famously fusty and white-gloved with daring, youth and irreverence.
Propelled by a dizzying forward momentum, Lagerfeld kept a formidable workload over the years. He designed more than a dozen collections annually for three visually distinct houses - Chanel, Fendi and his namesake label - and was the only designer to show two haute couture collections in Paris each season. He often photographed and filmed advertising campaigns for the houses under his direction, as well as editorials for leading magazines.
He was an enthusiastic collaborator, kickstarting the fast-fashion/designer partnership phenomenon with H&M in 2004 and lending his design talents to everything from Steiff bears to Steinway pianos. He even owned a Paris bookshop. Lagerfeld was also, of course, the keeper of Choupette, the white Birman cat with more than 100,000 Instagram followers.
Lagerfeld’s skill was in capturing the mood of the moment. He was an avid reader and observer, distilling everything he saw, heard and read into potent fashion images. (His library, mainly comprising photography and art books, is estimated to total more than 300,000 volumes.) “I get bored very easily. The thought of spending my life reworking the same theme over and over again is a nightmare”, he told The Guardian in 1985.
This determination to stay ahead required a lack of sentimentality and ruthless detachment from his own work. He often rid himself of art, objects and ideas that had previously inspired him. “A designer has to see himself like a building with TV antennas; you capture images of everything that’s going on, tape it, then forget it”, he declared in a 1984 interview with American Vogue.
Despite the cultural whirlwind that surrounded him, Lagerfeld himself remained strikingly unchanged. The stiff white collar, the leather gloves, the sunglasses and the ponytail contributed to a persona that existed well beyond the labels he represented.
Born to a wealthy family in Hamburg in 1933, Lagerfeld moved to Paris aged 14. He completed his education at Lycée Montaigne, where he learnt to sketch. He achieved early success, winning the coat award in the 1954 International Wool Secretariat competition. (A 19-year-old Yves Saint Laurent won the cocktail dress category, and the two became friends.) Lagerfeld was immediately hired as a junior assistant and then apprentice at Balmain, the haute couture house. This was followed by a stint at Jean Patou as designer in 1958.
When he departed Jean Patou in 1962 he also left haute couture, apparently tired of creating formal clothing for the rich. The decision to become a freelance ready-to-wear designer was regarded as bold, even foolhardy. The designer Fernando Sanchez, who was friends with him at the time, said that Lagerfeld understood that the fashion landscape was changing: “He totally grasped the epoch”, Sanchez said in an interview with Alicia Drake, author of Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent’s twin biography The Beautiful Fall. “He knew he wanted to do his own thing and not in some old couture house”.
Lagerfeld began working with Chloé in 1964. Chloé’s founder, Gaby Aghion, encouraged him to escape from his formal couture training and take a freer approach to design. By the early 1970s Chloé had evolved from an in-the-know Parisian label into an internationally recognised powerhouse.
In 1965 Lagerfeld added Fendi, the Rome-based fashion house, to his client list. Collaborating closely with the Fendi sisters, Lagerfeld helped catapult the Italian brand into global fame with a focus on luxury furs. And despite his self-professed short attention span, his six-decade tenure at Fendi is unparalleled by any other designer. (To put the length of his tenure in context: Lagerfeld began designing for Fendi before man walked on the moon.) His work at the Italian house was not without controversy. At a 1993 show he put adult entertainment star Moana Pozzi and strippers in lacy swimwear, causing Anna Wintour to walk out. The use of fur in collections led to much public criticism from PETA and elsewhere.
The designer founded his eponymous ready-to-wear label in 1984. It was sold to the Tommy Hilfiger Group in 2005 and is currently owned by investment fund Apax Partners. But Lagerfeld always seemed most at home designing under someone else’s name - most famously that of Coco Chanel.
In 1982, the chairman of Chanel, Alain Wertheimer, asked Lagerfeld to design for the house. The announcement was met with mutterings about whether this German styliste - and not a couturier - was up to the job of tackling this national monument. Lagerfeld had spent much of his career loudly criticising haute couture, insisting that it was a relic from the 1950s and “pas du tout moderne”. But Lagerfeld made his detractors eat their words. “Without disturbing the Chanel spirit, he managed to enliven the character of the clothes”, The New York Times wrote of his debut couture collection in January 1983.
“Today, not only have I lost a friend, but we have all lost an extraordinary creative mind to whom I gave carte blanche in the early 1980s to reinvent the brand,” Wertheimer said on Tuesday.
Lagerfeld’s genius was in his irreverent manipulation of the Chanel oeuvre. He made cult items of the house’s bouclé tweeds, pearls, gilt buttons, two-toned footwear and interlocking C’s for a new generation. He shrunk the jackets, shortened the skirts and blinged up the accessories. In doing so he helped build a multibillion-pound luxury empire and created a blueprint for designers like Tom Ford, Nicolas Ghesquière and Marc Jacobs, who have gone on to revitalise languishing fashion houses.
“Tradition is something that you have to handle carefully, because it can kill you. Respect was never creative," he told American Vogue in 1984. Lagerfeld’s relationship with haute couture’s petites mains, the highly skilled artisans who painstakingly bring the clothes to life, marked him from other designers. In 2003 he conceived Chanel’s Métiers d’Art, an annual runway show designed to highlight the rare craftsmanship of storied French workshops such as Desrues and Lesage.
Lagerfeld’s Chanel fashion shows illustrated the designer’s belief that fashion cannot exist in a bubble. “Fashion is also an attempt to make certain invisible aspects of the reality of the moment visible”, he wrote in the catalogue that accompanied Chanel’s 2005 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Chanel shows, with their elaborate runway sets, revealed an astute understanding of the power of image and hype. He sent models down the runway with branded hockey sticks and surfboards and, more recently, pushing shopping trollies in a Chanel supermarket.
“Lagerfeld’s strength is that he is as good at creating context as he is good at creating fashion”, Joan Juliet Buck, his friend and the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, wrote in 1979.
His desire to reflect what’s happening in culture wasn’t without its provocative moments. In Autumn/Winter 1991 he presented a rap and hip-hop themed show considered risqué and distasteful. “Rappers tell the truth, that’s what’s needed now”, he said with a shrug in a filmed post-show interview. More recently, the Spring/Summer 2015 show in which models stormed down the runway holding signs stamped with well-worn feminist slogans like ‘History is Her Story’ was criticised for appropriating a political message to sell clothes.
The ability to defy expectations extended well beyond the runway. In 2001, he lost 92 pounds so that, he said, he was slim enough to wear Dior Homme suits. His book, The Karl Lagerfeld Diet, became an international bestseller.
In 2004 H&M launched its first-ever designer collaboration with Lagerfeld. The unprecedented concept helped erase the line between high and low fashion. Its success made designer collaborations an annual part of its fashion calendar, with subsequent collections by Comme des Garçons, Lanvin and Maison Margiela.
Anna Wintour said that Lagerfeld’s fame was inevitable. “There’s just so much more media focused on fashion,” she told The New Yorker in 2007. “And because Karl is such a fascinating and unusual character and such an establishment figure at the same time - and of course so extraordinarily talented - it’s just been on a parallel course”.
It is difficult to identify Lagerfeld with a specific design ethos; his tastes have been described as straddling the rich baroque and the strictly modern. “I am not one of these people who feel they have established their look and want to keep on redoing it," he told The New York Times in 1979.
Perhaps Lagerfeld’s legacy is less about the body of work he leaves and more about the direction he led fashion, and the relentless curiosity with which he did it.
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