The world’s most iconic and prolific designer was widely known as the king of fashion.
PARIS, France — Karl Lagerfeld, arguably the world’s most iconic designer and undoubtedly the most prolific, has died in Paris. He was 85.
In a seven-decade career as fashion’s ultimate free agent, Lagerfeld created collections simultaneously for the celebrated houses of Chanel and Fendi, in addition to his signature label, at a pace without rival in the luxury industry.
Virginie Viard, director of Chanel’s design studio and Lagerfeld’s closest collaborator for more than 30 years, will take the creative reins at the storied brand’s fashion business. A succession plan has yet to be announced at Fendi.
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For Lagerfeld, to design was to breathe, “so if I can’t breathe, I’m in trouble,” he often quipped to journalists who were astonished by his inexhaustible work ethic and his insistence that he would never retire.
In fact, his creative output seemed only to become more bountiful in his golden years, a period during which his extravagant runway productions at the Grand Palais in Paris achieved a staggering level of theatrical opulence. At a cost of millions of dollars per season, the events surpassed the mundane boundaries of a fashion show to become something more like large-scale performance art — media spectacles where Lagerfeld, as both gifted designer and visual provocateur, could best demonstrate his ability to interweave the superficialities of fashion with matters of great depth, while also parading seemingly endless ways to keep Chanel’s classic tweeds looking modern and fresh.
His Autumn/Winter 2017 collection featured a 115-foot-tall mechanical rocket ship that simulated blast off. For Fall 2014, he built a Chanel shopping centre, its superstore-like aisles bursting with more than 500 different products that included a Chanel-logo chainsaw, doormats, candy, and ketchup. For Fall 2010, he imported enough snow and ice from Sweden to create a 265-ton indoor iceberg. Backdrops of a man-made beach with rippling waves (Spring 2019), a scale rendering of the Eiffel Tower (Fall 2017 Couture), a French brasserie with uniformed bartenders (Fall 2015) and an enormous model of a passenger ship (Cruise 2019) suggested no idea was too fantastical, nor expense too decadent.
His incredible longevity and success as a designer, and, following his logic, the fortunes of the companies for which he worked, owed at least partly to Lagerfeld’s intentional detachment from the business side of fashion. He claimed never to discuss sales figures or budgets with management. “I am a hired gun, even in my own business,” he said in a BBC interview, noting that his contracts with Chanel and Fendi allowed him to do whatever he wanted on the side. “I work my own marionette in a way, my own puppet,” he told The New York Times. “It’s something I control.” That extraordinarily rare freedom from the restraints of financial responsibility enabled him to continually make clothes that inspired consumers to dream.
“We created a product nobody needs, but people want,” he said. “If you need an ugly old car, it can wait, but if you want a new fashion item, it cannot wait.”
As designers half his age complained of burnout from fashion’s maddening pace, Lagerfeld made himself even busier by dabbling in a constant stream of publishing, photography, film and design projects, including a rule-breaking “fast fashion” collaboration with the mass retailer H&M in 2004 that predated the industry obsession with disruption by more than a decade. Ignoring the traditional expectations of a luxury player, he also designed hotel rooms, video games, motorcycle helmets, a BMW, and a cosmetics range inspired by his also-famous cat, Choupette, and directed an ad campaign for Magnum ice cream bars that featured a life size sculpture of model Baptiste Giabiconi rendered in chocolate. More than most of his sober-minded peers at fashion’s pinnacle, he relished his iconic status both within the industry and in popular culture. Despite all this extra-curricular output, though, he was driven by one thing in fashion, he said, which was to make his designs better than they were the season before.
As most profiles of Lagerfeld have noted, another thing that drove him was a desire to know everything. He filled his numerous homes, in Paris, Biarritz, and Saint-Tropez among others, with stacks of history books and biographies, iPods loaded with various types of music, and museum-worthy collections of artwork and furniture that he would, unceremoniously, dispose of every few years, once a new period or style captured his attention. With his vast memory and a rapid-fire way of working and speaking, he could summon details and themes on command, exploit them ruthlessly in a collection, and then immediately move on to the next thing. He once said he had a “Google mind.”