"That is to say, the creative force who lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its sartorial semiology and then wresting it into the present with a healthy dose of disrespect and a dollop of pop culture."

"Not that he put it that way exactly. What he said was: 'Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore — and then you get something out of her.' This approach has become almost quotidian in the industry, but before Mr. Lagerfeld was hired at Chanel, when the brand was fading into staid irrelevance kept aloft on a raft of perfume and cosmetics, it was a new and startling idea. That he dared act on it, and then kept doing so with varying degrees of success for decades, transformed not only the fortunes of Chanel (now said to have revenues of over $4 billion a year) but also his own profile.... But he rejected the idea of fashion-as-art, and the designer-as-tortured genius. His goal was more opportunistic...  His personal proclivities were a constantly mutating collection of decades, people and disciplines. His one great fear was of being bored. His conversations (or monologues) could, in almost one breath, bounce from Anita Ekberg romping in the Trevi fountain, to how rich women in the 1920s slept under ermine sheets, and then to the Danish fairy tale illustrator Kay Nielsen. His one blind spot was his own mortality, which he refused to acknowledge. As he said... 'I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.'"

The NYT was ready to go big on the death of Karl Lagerfeld, which has finally arrived. The long obit is by Vanessa Friedman.



ADDED: From a 2015 post of mine, quoting "A Comprehensive List Of Everything Karl Lagerfeld Hates":

"I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind.... I hate rich people when they try to be communists or socialists. I think it’s obscene.... I hate sloppy footwear. What I hate most is flip-flops. I am physically allergic to flip-flops.... And I hate to wear suspenders. I have the feeling I'm wearing a bra...."

Oh, how I wish more people would say interesting things!

"I’m fed up with [#MeToo]... I read somewhere that now you must ask a model if she is comfortable with posing. Its simply too much..."

"... from now on, as a designer, you can’t do anything. As for the accusations against the poor Karl Templar [creative director at Interview magazine], I don’t believe a single word of it. A girl complained he tried to pull her pants down and he is instantly excommunicated from a profession that up until then had venerated him. Its unbelievable. If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model! Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent. They’re recruiting even!"

Said Karl Lagerfeld, in an interview at Numéro... which is such a beautifully designed website that I am willing to believe that dropping the apostrophe in the contraction for "it is" was an aesthetic decision (and one that will, in time, catch on).

"I am not a traveler. I hate it.... Also I cannot go on airlines because people stare at me, you have to be touched by people. I hate that...I hate bespoke because I hate to be touched by strangers."

From "A Comprehensive List Of Everything Karl Lagerfeld Hates."

"I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind.... I hate rich people when they try to be communists or socialists. I think it’s obscene.... I hate sloppy footwear. What I hate most is flip-flops. I am physically allergic to flip-flops.... And I hate to wear suspenders. I have the feeling I'm wearing a bra...."

To me, the list makes the argument for allowing yourself to use that terrible word "hate." Did your mom teach you not to say "hate"? Do you have friends/relatives in your life who stand ready to meet your deployment of the word with some fussy chiding like "Oh, 'hate' is a very strong word" or "Hate?! Do you really mean hate?"? I hate that.

"I have kind of flashes in my mind and I try to put them on paper. Thinking? No. That is too serious."

Says the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who does not go out:

I imagine the world from my window. I’m happy wherever I am. I’m very happy to be in the Mercer right now because I bring myself with me wherever I go, thank God. Traveling, I think it’s a nightmare today. The airports and things the people in the street with the selfies … I like to stay at home and read.

What are you reading?

I will not talk about that. I like to read biographies, history, philosophical things like this. But it’s for my private use, and not for making people say, Oh, how clever this stupid man is. I don’t make intellectual conversation. I’m very superficial. I’m just a fashion designer. Fashion designers look at fashion magazines, right?

I'm quite amused by his form of expression. Short sentences that tease. Is he brilliant or an idiot? It's one thing I loved about Andy Warhol. You should read the whole interview, especially if you're into cats. Lagerfeld is quite devoted to one cat. That made me wonder whether Andy Warhol was attached to cats, and I see he put out a limited-edition book called "25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy." 

[T]here is no text in the book. The calligraphy for the book was done by Julia Warhola, Warhol's mother.... Warhol's mother left the letter "d" off of the word "Name" in the title and Warhol kept the error in, as he liked the random imperfections which appeared in his creations resulting from the techniques he used. Both Warhol and his mother had a passion for cats and they were all named Sam except for one called Hester....

Anyway, I wanted to talk about Lagerfeld's statement "I’m happy wherever I am.... I bring myself with me wherever I go." It's a sunny variation of the old "Wherever you go, there you are." Here's an old-time-y web page devoted to it: "Where have you seen or heard the quote 'No matter where you go, there you are'?" The challenge is to find a source before the iteration in the movie "Buckaroo Banzai."

Some people think their own dad started it. Many others cite Confucius. Remember when everything used to be attributed to Confucius? I think that habit was broken when it became socially unacceptable to begin the attribution with "Confucius say" — that is, leaving the letter "s" off the word "say," not as a random imperfection in the manner of Andy's mother, but following a deeply embedded convention about how to represent Chinese in English.

Somebody finds it in the 15th century devotional work by Thomas a Kempis, "The Imitation of Christ":

"So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are."

Maybe "Imitation of Christ" one of those "philosophical things" Karl Lagerfeld is reading, cat Choupette on his lap, in the Mercer Hotel. Or is he, because he is a fashion designer, reading fashion magazines? Did you know Imitation of Christ is a fashion label?

Karl Lagerfeld "said that in the future it would 'unfortunately' be 'OK' for women to be fat..."

"... but that at the moment it was unacceptable." He said runway models are "are skinny but they’re not that skinny. All the new girls are not that skinny. You know, there’s a new evolution." They're not anorexic — "nobody works with anorexic girls.... That has nothing to do with fashion. People who have that, they have problem with family and things like this. There are less than 1 per cent of anorexic girls, but there are over - in France, I don’t know about England - over 30 per cent of girls who are big, big, overweight."

If that irks you, enjoy this description of Lagerfeld written by the late great David Rakoff:

... Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money.

ADDED: The Daumier he might have been picturing:

Asking to be insulted and getting it.

I just ran across this passage written by David Rakoff, in an essay — from this book — about Paris fashion shows:

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn’t been written already?”

He’s absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

Karl Lagerfeld is against gay marriage "for a very simple reason."

See if it's simple enough for you to understand...

In the 60's, they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life. For me it’s difficult to imagine — one of the papas at work and the other at home with the baby. How would that be for the baby? I don’t know. I see more lesbians married with babies than I see boys married with babies. And I also believe more in the relationship between mother and child than in that between father and child.

... because I can't understand it.