Karl Lagerfeld, the novel of a life always (re) invented

Karl Lagerfeld, the novel of a life always (re) invented

Her slender silhouette with an immaculate ponytail goes up the catwalk one last time to applause, then disappears into the darkness of the backstage. Karl Lagerfeld has bowed out. The most iconic fashion designer died at the age of 85 on Tuesday.

From Balmain to Chanel, of which he was artistic director from 1983, via Fendi, Chloé or even H&M, Karl Lagerfeld has gone through the fashion of the last sixty years, constantly reinventing the silhouette of women, collection after collection, as he himself has reinvented himself over the decades. Because the images that have nourished his work have also shaped his life. Alternately end-of-the-century dandy, bodybuilder or rock aristocrat, Lagerfeld has donned a thousand and one costumes, until completely disappearing behind the succession of his avatars.

The novel of origins. Born in Hamburg to a wealthy milk producer of Swedish origin and a mother of Prussian descent, Karl Otto Lagerfeld grew up far from the upheavals of a Germany ravaged by the Brown Death and war, in the huge family estate of Brad Bramstedt in the heart of Schleswig-Holstein. When Karl is not wearing the Lederhose (the traditional Bavarian skin breeches), he dresses in his father's suit, is passionate about the French language, leafs through the pages of the satirical weekly Simplicissimus. He draws, daydreams a lot in front of "a painting that [he] saw at the age of 5, in a gallery in Hamburg" and that he was offered: "Frederic II dining under the rotunda of the palace of Sans-Souci with Voltaire", he told Paris Match.

His childhood is especially marked by the maternal figure: "My mother was mean and funny. It was well coated, but she said these horrors! She was irresistible", he explained again to Gala. In many interviews, the designer spoke of his relationship with this authoritarian but protective woman, whom he sometimes depicted as a high bourgeois, an aviator, or an elegant 1920s collector of lovers. Because interview after interview, Karl Lagerfeld has multiplied the variations on his origins, as Alicia Drake notes in his unauthorized biography Beautiful People. The creator has thus woven a novel of origins around his youth, in which cultural references that have never ceased to nourish his work are mixed: the 18th century of the Enlightenment, the end of the century Mittleeuropa and the Roaring Twenties. But the gray areas remain. His date of birth, for example, has long been a mystery: 1933 or 1938? In 2013, he pretended to restore the truth in Paris Match, with an improbable anecdote: "1935. My mother had changed the date. It was easier to make a 3 or an 8".

The first years ended with a stroke of brilliance, true this one: on November 25, 1954, at the age of 19, he won first prize in the competition of the "International Wool Secretariat" with his sketches... in equality with a certain Yves Saint Laurent.

The man with dozens of marks. Spotted by Pierre Balmain, Karl Lagerfeld became his assistant in 1955 then, in the process, was recruited as artistic director at Jean Patou. “It is there, really where I learned the trade”, he explained in the documentary of Loïc Prigent, Lagerfeld takes shape. Very quickly, the young creator multiplies the contracts, as a true pioneer of freelance: Fendi, Ballantyne, Mario Valentino, Krizia, Charles Jourdan or Chloé. A jack of all trades, he ended up going beyond the sole domain of fashion, trying his hand at photography and publishing.

The year 1983 marked a turning point in his career: he became the artistic director of Chanel. The stakes are high: dusting off one of the jewels of French elegance, which has fallen into disuse since the death of "Mademoiselle" in 1970. Coco Chanel herself had outdone herself by castigating at the end of her life wearing pants and miniskirts. Lagerfeld goes there with her sweep: in 1993, Claudia Schiffer parades in her underwear. Willingly parodic, even iconoclastic, the couturier nevertheless continues to decline the classics of the house: the tweed jacket, the little black dress, the quilted bag, etc. Success is there and growing over the decades; between 2010 and 2014, the brand's turnover jumped by 63%.

Every Fashion Week, Lagerfeld's creations are among the most scrutinized and photographed. But there again, the couturier keeps all his mystery. If his collaborations allow him to multiply the facets of his talent - Lagerfeld juggling over the collections with the codes of the different brands that employ him -, a question arises: is there a Lagerfeld style? Gabrielle Chanel freed the woman from the stays of their bodice, building a slender silhouette, in black and white, almost that of a mischievous schoolgirl if there were not for the discreet elegance of a string of pearls. At the end of the war, Christian Dior extolled an ultra-sophisticated woman-flower, all in curves and ornaments.

In the 1960s, Yves Saint Laurent slipped the basics of the men's wardrobe onto the shoulders of women, and offered them, through an effect of contrasts, a conquering femininity. Despite his big differences, Lagerfeld has his hobbies: white collars, gloves, black suits, ultra-structured lines, but is that enough to transcend the field of fashion to mark the history of clothing? The interested party has always refused to measure up to history: "What I know is that I am never satisfied with myself [...]. What interests me is the present, and the present only. You have to follow your time, be opportunistic in the good sense of the word, and always improve", he declared to Figaro Madame in 2015.

Karl Lagerfeld, the novel of a (re)invented still life

Lagerfeld has remained faithful to the Chanel style, but never really to himself. Above, from left to right, four haute couture models and three decades apart: 1988, 1997, 2009 and 2017.

Credits: Pierre GUILLAUD / Pierre VERDY / François GUILLOT / Patrick KOVARI

A Lagerfeld for every decade. "Always improve". An adage that Karl Lagerfeld applied not only to his work but also to his own person, constantly in search of another himself. Throughout the pages of his photo album, the couturier is never alike. At the end of the 1950s, it was with the costume of the ideal son-in-law that he set out to conquer Paris. At the time, he used gallons of brilliantine to tame his brown curls. In the 1960s, Karl, in patent ankle boots and a waistcoat, his throat strangled by a lavallière and the lower part of his face devoured by a thick black beard, seemed to come out of a novel by Huysmans. His assiduous practice of bodybuilding gives him in the 1970s a bodybuilder's body that he walks on the beach of Saint-Tropez.

Ten years later, the creator has become encumbered. On the catwalks, he comes to greet behind dark glasses, frantically waves a large white fan in front of his face. But who remembers this man? His last metamorphosis supplanted all the others. In 2000, Karl Lagerfeld lost 42 kilos with one goal: to fit into the “slim” suits designed by Hedi Slimane. Soon, his white ponytail, his silver rings and his leather mittens fixed the image of a neo-Gothic dandy who sold as well as the dresses designed for Chanel. Transformed into a plush, a key ring, a brooch, Lagerfeld even appears on the bottles of Coca Cola of which he is a big consumer - light only. "I am a living label. My name is Labelfeld and not Lagerfeld," he quipped in 2011 in an interview with CNN.

According to his whims, living environments multiply; Karl Lagerfeld collects second homes, which he takes particular care to decorate. In Paris, he is fond of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he acquires a villa in Germany on the banks of the Elbe, an 18th century castle in Morbihan, or even a palace in Monaco. But where to meet the real Karl? At the designer's, in his art-deco apartment on the left bank, or at the gentleman's table in his Breton estate? Once again, the multiplicity makes it elusive: "I like to decorate houses, not necessarily to live in them. Sometimes, I have no life to put into them", he admits to Loïc Prigent.

Half angel, half demon. His private life, he jealously protects it. We only know of one great love: Jacques de Bascher, a son of minor nobility sixteen years his junior. With the face of an angel and a devil in his body, Jacques met Karl in the gay clubs on rue Sainte-Anne. "He was the most chic Frenchman I've seen. [...]", says the couturier about the man who dared to wear a Lederhose the day they first met. Bascher is at all the parties, multiplies the conquests. By pinning Yves Saint Laurent to his hunting board, he triggered a final quarrel with Pierre Bergé.

Lagerfeld has always assured that his relationship with Bascher, who organizes orgies in the bachelor flat he makes available to him, had remained platonic: "I had no physical contact with him", he swears in the biography of Marie Ottavi*. For Jacques, Karl organizes some of the most memorable evenings in seventies Paris, such as his Venetian ball at the Palace in 1978: the handsome Jacques arrives there disguised as a Rialto bridge. Around them gravitate Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, the illustrator Antonio Lopez, the photographer Helmut Newton or even Jerry Hall. While the jet-set sinks into alcohol and drugs, Karl Lagerfeld, epicenter of social Paris, remains a mere spectator. He does not drink, does not smoke, does not sleep: "I like people who are not, like me, puritans. I admired people who knew how to destroy themselves, but I was not good at it “, he admits to Liberation in 2005.

The ravages of AIDS put an end to the intoxication of Parisian nights. Jacques de Bascher is not spared. Installed on a makeshift bed in the room of the dying at the Garches hospital, Karl Lagerfeld witnesses the slow decrepitude of the beloved devoured by Kaposi's sarcoma. "Jako" died on September 3, 1989. Decades later, Karl continued to send the deceased's mother his sketches of the young man: "I close my eyes, and I see him...", he wrote on one two.

The dream of a lifetime. Death, Lagerfeld, so concerned about himself, has nevertheless always spoken of it casually. In front of Loïc Prigent, he quotes the poet Shelley: "'Waking up from the dream of life'... and basta!" After the death of Yves Saint Laurent in 2008, the "Kaiser" Karl remains the last giant of haute couture. He will never have been as creative as in his last years, stubbornly refusing to think about retirement, even at over 80 years old. "My fortune teller told me: 'For you, it starts when it stops for the others'", he says at the microphone of Europe 1. His big differences are more and more dizzying: at Chanel, he designs some of the most expensive dresses and suits in the world, when the pieces in his collection at H&M sell for less than a hundred euros. "I can do what I want, where I want, it's the height of luxury," he said on Euronews in 2016. Disappeared Tuesday at 85, Karl Lagerfeld, without concern for his posterity and that it will be said, wanted to enjoy alive the myth that he has carved out for himself.

*Marie Ottavi, Jacques de Bascher, shadow dandy, Séguier, 2017