Karl Lagerfeld

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September 22, 2012 by longformaleveninggowns1

With an edge of subversion as his perennial leitmotif, Lagerfeld reinvented and revivified one of the most important and historic brands in the world. And he has brought this same fearlessness into less heady markets, designing wildly successful capsule collections for H & M and Macy’s. When asked why he would lower himself—from designing $3,000 shorts for Chanel to entire dresses for a sliver of the price—he answered in typical fashion: “Because it amuses me.”

Although he has a love of the eighteenth century—he views it as both the most polite and the most modern period, a time when “no one was young; no one was old. Everyone had white hair”—Lagerfeld is firmly planted in the now. “Fuck the good old days,” he told Vogue in 2004. “Today has to be okay, too. If not you make something second-rate out of the present.”

In his first years as creative director, Lagerfeld was accused by some critics of going too far—so far as to desecrate their hallowed memories of Chanel. He threw so much leather and chains into his early collections that his old friend Yves Saint Laurent balked: Chanel, he said, had become “frightening, sadomasochistic.” “Who can say what is good taste and what is bad taste?” the designer has countered. “Sometimes bad taste is more creative than good taste.”

In the deep, all-knowing German voice that could belong to no other, Karl Lagerfeld declared in 1984, “I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon.” In this—as in so many things—he was, if perhaps not self-effacing, extremely prescient. Today, the influence of his designs is rivaled only by the infamy of his ever-present dark sunglasses (“They’re my burka,” he has professed), his magnetic pull towards controversy, and his tendency to say things like, “Vanity is the healthiest thing in life.”

Lagerfeld has become far more than just a fashion phenomenon. With runway conquests at the houses of Chloé, Fendi, and , and as a remarkable barometer of the twenty-first-century zeitgeist, he is an industry unto himself. In a business that tosses the word “icon” about with reckless abandon, he is genuinely iconic, wielding his trademark fan and his repertoire of witticisms—sometimes provocative, often amusing, and always Karl. Old enough to be the grandfather of some of his Parisian competitors, he is a modern Oscar Wilde, a black-leather dandy with a rock-and-roll pout.

Lagerfeld fights a fear of boredom by channeling his intense energy and curiosity into a variety of activities, any of which could be a separate career. Besides designing his many fashion lines, this multilingual hyphenate is a photographer, director, illustrator, costume designer, and diet guru. He has filled numerous homes with extraordinary decorative arts—and delighted auction houses when he’s put many of these objets under the gavel. His public appearances have superstar overtones; more than three quarters of a million people follow him on Twitter. His attendance at the 2005 Tokyo opening of the world’s largest Chanel store drew tears from fans in the crowd. “I witnessed not just one but many grown women weeping as Lagerfeld took to the thoroughfare,” reported André Leon Talley in Vogue.

The success of Karl Lagerfeld—who can reportedly turn out 200 original lightning-speed sketches in a twelve-hour stretch—is founded on a high level of technical skill, honed from an early age. After moving to Paris as a young man, he competed in a design contest sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat. His winning garment, a wool coat, led him to an apprenticeship with . (The dress category in the same competition was won by Yves Saint Laurent.) Despite his victory, Lagerfeld admitted that he didn’t much like designing coats; what he really loved doing, he told a reporter, was little black dresses. He went on, of course, to become the crown-bearer of the timeless empire whose founder was herself the progenitor of said little black dress: Chanel.

Fifty-seven years after Vogue first showed readers Coco Chanel’s innovative LBD in 1926, the company was placed in Lagerfeld’s studded, fingerless-gloved hands, and neither the LBD nor Chanel were ever the same. “My job,” Lagerfeld has said, “is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.” In a way, this is what he did for the Chanel image, as well: Its elegance and dignity had lost their clout among the sixties generation of jeans-and-miniskirts-wearers, but Lagerfeld was able to transform the house into the ultimate purveyor of bad-girl chic (wealthy bad girl, that is). He was, it turned out, the perfect designer to bring the nodding camellias back to life. “Tradition is something you have to handle carefully, because it can kill you,” he told Vogue in 1984. “Respect was never creative.”