Lagerfeld’s determination to stay current requires ruthlessness and a lack of sentimentality. He periodically rids himself of art, objects, and places that, previously, had been sources of inspiration and pleasure. People are not exempt. “He kind of passes on, because he doesn’t like the past,” one of the people who travels in Lagerfeld’s circle says. “So then he decides you’re the past and then he just puts you in the trash.” Lagerfeld says, “I have an entourage of people of today. Because people can work with me for a hundred years but they have to stay informed. And no regrets, no remove, not saying, ‘Oh, things were better then.’ ” According to his publishing partner, Gerhard Steidl, when Lagerfeld reads a thick paperback, he tears out the pages as he finishes them.
Paradoxically, Lagerfeld is a devotee of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and he has been a serious collector of Art Deco. His passion for history is reflected in his dress, a mixture of the contemporary (Dior jackets worn with skintight Diesel jeans) and the self-consciously retro, including antique jewelry and custom shirts by Hilditch & Key, with high, stiff collars that recall gentlemen like Walther Rathenau, an early-twentieth-century German Jewish industrialist who was the model for a character in Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” and Count Harry Kessler, a nineteenth-century Anglo-German art patron who ran a small publishing house, wrote several volumes of diaries (which Lagerfeld has read), and was legendary for his dandified style of dress. To Lagerfeld, Rathenau and Kessler represent all that was noble about Weimar Germany. “I’m German in my mind,” Lagerfeld says, “but from a Germany that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Lagerfeld’s love of blending past and present is obvious in his description of his new home, on the Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank. Having purchased four apartments on two floors of a two-hundred-year-old building overlooking the Louvre, he is gutting the place and constructing a town house. The upper floor will contain only furniture and art made after the year 2000, including pieces by the Bouroullec brothers, Marc Newson, and others. The lower floor, Lagerfeld says, “is the Old World”; it will feature a large library furnished with pieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as from his Art Deco collection. Living in the house will be “like floating in your own spaceship over a very civilized past,” Lagerfeld says. (Some years ago, he bought a mansion in Biarritz, where, he says, he spent millions of dollars refurbishing it, staffed it with servants, and stocked it with a hundred and fifty thousand of his books. In 2006, after realizing that he had not visited the place in two years, he sold it.)
In preparation for the move to the Quai Voltaire, Lagerfeld recently sold the house where he has lived for the last thirty years, an eighteen-thousand-square-foot mansion on the Rue de l’Universite, and one afternoon in early December he was in the process of moving out. The house, a converted
hotel particulier
built in the late seventeen-hundreds, is shielded from the street by a towering porte cochere, and sits beyond a cobblestone courtyard where a white-coated valet greets visitors and leads them into a foyer the size of an average two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Through a doorway off the foyer is a room with gold-leaf moldings, a painted ceiling, a vast crystal chandelier, and a table forty feet long, surrounded by straight-backed chairs. Lagerfeld calls this “the most beautiful room in all of Paris,” and says that it was designed by Jacques Verberckt, who decorated rooms at Versailles. But he prefers to entertain guests next door, in a small, less formal room, whose walls, from wainscot to ceiling, he has lined with rare German advertising posters from before the First World War. At the center of the room are a boxy Bauhaus sofa and an umbrella-like modernist lamp. In one corner, propped against the ornate molding, is a life-size cardboard cutout of Lagerfeld, glowering in dark glasses, from the H & M advertising campaign.
Lagerfeld was scheduled to attend a dinner party at eight but declined to say where. “I hate name-dropping,” he said. Asked if the host was someone famous, he pursed his lips and muttered, “I am not knowing so many unknown people, hmm?” Indeed, he calls Mick Jagger “Micky.” (Later, one of Lagerfeld’s friends revealed that his hostess that evening was Mme. Chirac.) Recently, however, Lagerfeld claims to have lost almost all interest in going out. “I’m not a social person,” he says. “Not that I’m not at ease. I’m pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It’s not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that’s all.” He hates the telephone, and communicates with the outside world primarily through faxes, which he writes in flowing script with a fountain pen. “I have a direct line, but I don’t even remember the number,” he says. “I have cell phones, but I don’t use them. Personally, it is nearly impossible to reach me.” He insists that he is never lonely. “This is another cliche?the
loneliness
,” he says in mocking tones. “I have to fight to be alone! And you have to recharge the batteries. People who can’t be alone have a problem. Loneliness is a luxury for people like me.”
Lagerfeld likes to insist that his passion for knowledge is a private matter: “There is only one thing I am really interested in, and that is knowing?not for display or conversation or discussion. I never discuss.” He adds, with a Wildean flourish, “I like to look very superficial.” But he seems to need to demonstrate that he is a man whose interests transcend fashion?this, despite his repeated avowals that he does not think he’s too good for what he does. He frequently mentions his love for the poetry of Rilke and Emily Dickinson, and holds forth on the war poet Alan Seeger, whose work Edition 7L has published; but he does not discuss these subjects as an intellectual might?quoting lines from memory, analyzing themes. Rather, they are passing references in a zigzagging monologue, in which the words and ideas tumble out at such speed that they become almost unintelligible?digressions within digressions. “For me, the perfect writing is E. B. White?that’s how one should write English,” he told me at his home on the Rue de l’Universite. “The sound, the language, what it evokes for me. I see New York with the eyes of his book about New York. Like Colette in French. Even someone like Leautaud?whom you probably don’t know. Leautaud was the son of a courtesan and his father was a bad actor who became a
souffleur
in the Comedie-Francaise?you know, the one who sits in a box onstage and whispers lines to the actors when they forget them? Prompter! He wrote three books and then he started a publishing house, a very good one, the Mercure de France, and stayed all his life there as the editor of the Mercure literature review, and he loved cats and animals?which I’m not crazy for. Everything he did all of his life, I don’t like, but his writing, for me, his descriptions of Paris?I go to the street where he went for fifty, sixty years, and I see it only with his eyes. He became famous in France in the fifties because Robert Mallet, from the Sorbonne, made on the radio?because there was no television?conversations with him, which were recorded. And I have them on CD; his voice is like an actor from another era. It’s like Colette; she speaks French from an era that nobody speaks like this; they used to pronounce their ‘r’ very differently in French”?he demonstrates an “r” rolled with a trill in the front of the mouth, then hurries on: “I read poetry a lot and I even publish poetry. I made an edition of a woman called Catherine Pozzi, who was the mistress of Paul Valery?she was married to a man who wrote plays, but they divorced quickly and she was the daughter of a famous doctor. You know the painting of Sargent’s of a very handsome man in a red robe? That was her father, the very famous Dr. Pozzi, who was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and lover and…”
Lagerfeld spoke like this, almost without interruption, for nearly two hours. He then nodded discreetly to his hovering manservant, who vanished, then quickly reappeared with a silver salver upon which sat a pitcher of water, an empty glass, a foil envelope, and a spoon. Lagerfeld sprinkled brown powder from the envelope into the glass, added just enough water to wet the granules, then used the spoon to stir the mixture into a thick paste that resembled chocolate pudding but was, he said, protein. He spooned the substance into his mouth without relish, swallowed it, and was soon speaking again, about his plans to reprint the work of a once-popular poet named Anna de Noailles?“who was born Anna de Brancovan, and was of Romanian descent, and who was one of the first women elected to the Academie in Belgium?not in France, because she died in 1933?and her poetry is stunning.…”
Finally, Lagerfeld stopped talking and agreed to give a tour of the house. After warning, “You will think I’m a madman,” he led the way up a grand curving marble staircase. The second floor is composed of huge rooms with soaring ceilings, ornate plasterwork, wood panelling, and fifteen-foot-high mirrors. The furniture, a mixture of antique and modernist pieces, was almost impossible to see, hidden under hundreds of magazines, CDs, photographs, promotional brochures, and books, which lay in heaps spilling on every surface, including the floors. Scattered through the rooms were dozens of iPod nanos of every hue. Each one was loaded with songs that Lagerfeld listens to when designing his collections, which he does, he says, usually in the mornings, while dressed in a long white smock. Surveying the scene through his black glasses, Lagerfeld said serenely, “Normal people think I’m insane.”
He spends most of his time in a thousand-square-foot room, at the center of which sat a modern fourposter bed. The posts were made of fluorescent bulbs, and a sable bedspread was strewn with paperbacks and magazines and more iPods. Lagerfeld says that he sleeps seven hours a night in this bed; he also spends considerable time lounging on it during his waking hours, reading and drawing. There was a large desk a few feet away, piled with papers, sketchbooks, magazines, books, newspapers, and art supplies. Lagerfeld complains that his desk kept getting “buried.” To deal with the problem, he recently bought four more desks. They got buried, too. A Mac G5 computer was visible among the messy stacks of books and papers on a long table at the foot of his bed, but Lagerfeld insists that he rarely uses it and does not surf the Internet?partly because he is fearful of how it might compromise his privacy. “I don’t want to be on the Internet,” he said. “I hardly use a credit card?everything where you can be fixed. I’m floating. Nobody can catch me, mmm?”
He led the way into a room that had a huge table heaped with more books, CDs, DVDs, photographs, iPods, and magazines. “Look,” he said, sounding a little amazed. “It goes on and on and on.” He considered for a moment. “But I love it!” He claims to know where everything is, and it’s not an idle boast. On several occasions during the afternoon, he disappeared into these rooms to fetch things, including a copy of the Colette novel “Mitsou,” which provided the inspiration for a recent Chanel photo campaign that he had shot, and a copy of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which he had illustrated with paintings made entirely with cosmetics. He returned in minutes with the books.
“This is the room for the jeans, the shirts, the jewelry, the ties, the gloves, and things like this,” he said, entering a narrow room lined with shelves. On the top of a bureau were perhaps two hundred pairs of fingerless gloves, arranged in neat piles according to color (he explained that he chose the gray pair he’s wearing because of the overcast sky). There are also dozens of pairs of jeans, and belts laid out by the hundred. In a tray on another bureau were tangles of Chrome Hearts necklaces, rings, buckles, clasps, pins, brooches; on shelves below, scores of white shirts were stacked. Next door was a windowless room containing a dozen garment racks on wheels, each one stuffed with suits?perhaps five hundred in all?in black or gray hues. “I have suits here I’ve never worn,” Lagerfeld said. “To normal people it may look sick, huh?” He shrugged. “I don’t know what ‘normal’ means, anyway.” He went into a room that looked like a bookstore stockroom during the Christmas season, and suddenly his attention was caught by a stack of dusty leather-bound tomes. “This is something I want to publish,” he said, opening the book at the top of the stack. “This is the first German illustrated weekly paper, called the
Neue Berliner Illustrierte
. And thank God it was preserved, because very little survived. This is a complete set. I just found it in Germany.”
In a small anteroom, amid more heaped books and magazines, was a black and red grand piano of sleek modernistic design. “I designed this for the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Steinway,” Lagerfeld said. “I’m not very gifted as a piano player, so I’m giving it away as a Christmas gift.” At the base of a small armchair were six plastic bags stuffed with folded papers. “These are newspapers I bought and haven’t had time to read yet,” he said. “I go through the most important, and the rest are unimportant things?they can wait.”
For Lagerfeld, the value of all this information is less in the design ideas it might incite than as a hedge against his fear that he is slipping behind. Daily headlines, he says, “give the air of the moment. It is like music, which is like the coloration of the air. It puts you in a mood. It’s for the attitude, for the feeling. That’s why it’s important.” Lagerfeld is evasive about what inspires his work, but it’s obvious that he adjusts not just his pen but his personality to whichever of the three fashion houses he is working for. In contrast to his designs for Chanel (which are fragile, poetic, and feminine) and Fendi (which have a kind of hard-edged extroversion), those for his Karl Lagerfeld line are often sombre, reflecting the gray skies and bleakness of rural northern Germany, where he grew up. For his fall-winter, 2006, Karl Lagerfeld and Lagerfeld Collection lines, he sent down the runway emaciated models in tattered shifts of brown, black, and gray?a grim display that prompted reviewers to use the word “post-apocalyptic.” After the show, Lagerfeld gave an interview to Tim Blanks, of Style.com, in which he cited as influences on the collection Strindberg’s plays, Munch’s paintings, the stark tales of Isak Dinesen, and Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” “We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world,” Lagerfeld said. “So I think they are right for the moment, hmm?” Blanks asked, “Do you respond to current events that directly?” “You do it without knowing it,” Lagerfeld replied. “I have the feeling this mood is in the air.” (Lagerfeld’s fall, 2007, collection, which he presented two weeks ago, in Paris, was similarly austere, featuring tailored pieces in dark colors paired with flat black boots.)
Perhaps the most revealing index to Lagerfeld’s creative mind?to his insistence on keeping history alive even as he professes the need to forget it?was a room on the first floor at the end of a crooked hallway, which he saved for the end of his house tour. Here, Lagerfeld had reassembled his childhood bedroom, using the furniture and art that he had as a seven-year-old in Germany. Hanging on a wall just outside the bedroom was an oil painting that his mother gave to him when he was a boy, depicting Voltaire meeting Frederick the Great of Prussia: a group of eighteenth-century courtiers in velvet coats and powdered periwigs. “This is how I dreamed life should be,” Lagerfeld said. “Can you imagine?at seven?”
Last September, Alicia Drake, a British fashion writer based in Paris, published a book titled “The Beautiful Fall,” a chronicle of the fashion demimonde of Paris in the nineteen-seventies and of a bitter rivalry that arose between Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. The designers declined to talk to Drake, but she managed to interview Lagerfeld’s eighty-nine-year-old cousin, Kurt, months before he died, as well as some friends, colleagues, mentors, and muses whom Lagerfeld has become estranged from over the decades: Anna Piaggi, a longtime contributor to Italian
Vogue;
Gilles Dufour, a former protege and assistant for twenty-five years; Gaby Aghion, a former mentor and a co-founder of the label Chloe, where Lagerfeld worked for two decades; and the designer Paloma Picasso.
Drake argues that Lagerfeld was born, in Hamburg, not in 1938, as he has long claimed, but in 1933?a fact attested to by his cousin Kurt, a schoolmate, and a neighbor. Lagerfeld reacted to the book with rage. “It’s the dirtiest thing in the world,” he told me. “Everything is fixed; there’s not one person I know well who talked?only people I had fired, or whom I hardly know, or who never existed.” He sued Drake for invasion of privacy. (On January 15th, a French court dismissed Lagerfeld’s suit, and he was ordered to pay Drake’s legal fees.) Drake’s book also includes admiring descriptions of Lagerfeld’s designs and work ethic, but Lagerfeld was not appeased. “Maybe I don’t want to seem hardworking!” he told me.
Lagerfeld’s parents were cultured people whose idea of small talk was to debate the religious philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin over dinner. Christian Lagerfeld, his father, made a fortune in condensed milk; his mother, Elisabeth, played the violin. In the mid-thirties, as Hitler rose to power, Lagerfeld’s father moved the family to an isolated country estate in northern Germany, where Karl, his older sister, and a half sister from his father’s first marriage were raised. Lagerfeld has said that he knew nothing of the Nazis and the war; but, according to Drake’s interviews with Kurt Lagerfeld (whose credibility Karl has challenged) and with neighbors of Karl’s, the Lagerfeld family suffered severe deprivations. In a letter that Lagerfeld wrote to Drake, and which was quoted extensively in
Women’s Wear Daily
, the designer refuted this characterization: “There was food all the time and [your] description of the end of the war is very romantic, but it was very different.… The farmers were not poor people with three cows.” In a p.s., he added, “I felt loved and protected by my parents?in a time like the ’40s when it was not easy to have a protected life.”
As a boy, Lagerfeld read precociously, including “Das Nibelungenlied” and the letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, also known as the Princess Palatine, a member of the court of Louis XIV. At school, he was a good student, but friendless. “I was too exotic for where I was,” he told me. “I hated the company of other children. I wanted to be a grownup person, to be taken seriously. I hated the idea of childhood; I thought it was a moment of endless stupidity.” He was devoted to his mother, who seemed rarely to miss an opportunity to criticize him. He has said that he decided never to smoke cigarettes after his mother told him that his hands were exceptionally ugly and that smoking would only draw attention to them; she also told him that his stories were “so boring” that he should hurry up and tell them?he says this accounts for his rapid speech. Lagerfeld recounts these instances of maternal cruelty without self-pity and even defends his mother, saying that children’s stories are indeed boring. His mother was tough, he concedes, “but right for a boy with a head like this”?he throws his hands wide apart.