Karl Lagerfeld, 1935-2019
February 20, 2019 12:07 AM   Subscribe

Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer who oversaw the transformation of Chanel into an intercontinental superbrand, has died aged 85. posted by ellieBOA (35 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Counterpoint: Lagerfeld was a fatphobic, racist bigot, whose strength in the industry allowed outmoded and wrong ideas to go unchecked for decades.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:38 AM on February 20, 2019 [101 favorites]


TIME has posted videos of his "most spectacular" shows (they stopped at twenty).
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:39 AM on February 20, 2019


100% This

And his clothes weren't even that great.

I bet he left all his money to that stupid cat.
posted by cilantro at 2:01 AM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


Fashion Television was watched intently on a lot of bar room screens in 80s Canada. I'll bet nearly every old moustached, truckerhat wearing, Players smoking hoser knows who Karl Lagerfeld was.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:50 AM on February 20, 2019 [10 favorites]


Yeah, Karl Lagerfeld really was an unpleasant person in a lot of ways, but I want his library.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 4:19 AM on February 20, 2019


He stacked his books horizontally! He was a monster!
posted by parki at 4:45 AM on February 20, 2019 [15 favorites]


what a weirdo.

There is an AbFab quote that I can't quite remember or find - Saffy saying something about her mother subscribing her to lagerfeld's house of pain catalog?

After typing that maybe it wasn't as funny as I remember. Oh well. I still think he was a bloody weirdo.
posted by james33 at 5:03 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, this is one of those times I won't be giving a "."

Good riddance. I hope this ultimately marks a changing of the guard for the fashion industry. May plus size, gender non-binary and women of color now take over.
posted by nightrecordings at 5:19 AM on February 20, 2019 [16 favorites]


Ok he was a garbage human but I'll never know someone so audaciously out of touch with reality and his own life that he claimed to have a Facebook made of white gold (I can't find the link) and that seriously was a catch phrase I adopted for years.

Oddly enough I hadn't really thought about his existence for a long time until now.
posted by Young Kullervo at 5:25 AM on February 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


To his credit, he's been a great source of parody for Go Fug Yourself. I'm especially fond of the SWINTON entry.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:47 AM on February 20, 2019 [11 favorites]


He's probably going to leave his entire estate to Choupette, isn't he.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:50 AM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


.
posted by oneironaut at 5:52 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


He voiced himself as host of K109 The Studio radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV.
posted by Ideefixe at 6:05 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


If you want a book full of personal and unauthorized details about both Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent plus a lot of incidental social history, you could do worse than The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, St. Laurent and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris. It will not convince you that these are fantastic people with great values, because they sure aren't, but I found it pretty engaging and it also helped me remember how to periodize seventies and eighties French elections and economic shocks.

Both Lagerfeld and St. Laurent seemed like horrible, horrible people, but also people who were extremely damaged by homophobia. There's a particular scene from early in Lagerfeld's life, where he's just beginning to experience some success as a behind the scenes designer, when these friends of his who are sponging off him and living in luxury for free betray him in this horrible, cruel way...and then there's the very long narrative about the death from AIDS of his close friend? boyfriend? romantic-friend-but-not-boyfriend? (Who also seemed like an awful, balked person.) The book is also pretty good, in an indirect way, on the French class system - something else that deforms and balks the subjects.

The book also really shows how the fashion economy is a system and its toxicities are systemic - if you're good at design and drawing, which both Saint Laurent and Lagerfeld were (Lagerfeld, IMO, especially) it seems to be difficult to put your talents to work without being sucked in, very young, to a system of cruelties and greed which itself makes you a worse person.

I came away from the book feeling that while Lagerfeld was genuinely a horrible person, he was also something of a tragic figure.

~~
Lagerfeld seems to have been pretty creative with his past, some of which has made it into the obituaries. The book claims, for instance, that the "estate" where he grew up and his "socialite" mother were simply an ordinary comfortable bourgeois house and an intelligent but not especially social or glamorous bourgeois woman. His father was some kind of administrator for a milk company - well-paid, got to travel, etc, but nothing flashy. He does seem to have been very good to his mother and astonishingly generous to his friends. And he truly does seem to have been the intellectual designer he strove to appear.
posted by Frowner at 6:24 AM on February 20, 2019 [40 favorites]


My main reaction when thinking about Karl Lagerfeld is that I can't recall a single photograph of him in which his clothing and overall styling didn't look foolish. "A vampire from 1983 called. He wants his look back."
posted by slkinsey at 7:07 AM on February 20, 2019 [10 favorites]


but also people who were extremely damaged by homophobia

I mean, that's...literally almost all of us. Most of us don't go on to become monsters. This dude doesn't get a pass on his monstrosity, and I'm honestly so tired of people trying to humanize people who choose to be monsters when they also happen to be dudes.

He was a shitty person who made some good art, I guess, and then used the power he accumulated to magnify the effects of his shittiness. He's in the bad place.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:33 AM on February 20, 2019 [20 favorites]


In the spirit of finding something nice to say, I found Will Ferrell's portrayal of him in Zoolander to be especially touching.
posted by Optamystic at 7:35 AM on February 20, 2019 [8 favorites]


Art moves me to a better place. Some apparently high percentage of great artists are terrible people. Rather than judging, I choose to be squirming (unsure if uncomfortably or deliciously) in the cognitive dissonance.

.
posted by otherchaz at 7:55 AM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]


So who's going to take care of Choupette?
posted by madcaptenor at 7:59 AM on February 20, 2019


I think some people here are being a little hard on the cat.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:46 AM on February 20, 2019 [15 favorites]


Look, anyone who wants to marry their cat can't be all bad.

.
posted by HandfulOfDust at 9:12 AM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


Sort of like loving the Notre Dame de Paris despite not being Catholic, I suppose

or just all manner of non-horrible aspects of the world we live in that have specifically Roman Catholic origins. I'm sure there are more Lagerfeld related horrors than this thread could ever hope to reflect, but none of that changes the fact that his impact on how the world actually looks is significant. And yes, some (perhaps most) of this impact hasn't been for the best, but not all of it.

Not the font.
posted by philip-random at 9:34 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Definitely a different sort of person who lived in a parallel universe with a very rarified atmosphere.
Apart from his fame in haute couture he was an acclaimed photographer; rightly so I believe.
That does not make him a nicer person.
A 1990 conversation where he talks about his photography.
posted by adamvasco at 10:00 AM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


You know why he wore those gloves? Because he didn’t want to feel anything.
posted by valkane at 10:40 AM on February 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


The cat already has $3.4m from appearing in adverts, apparently. I am not sure we can blame the cat for having more money than it knows what to do with.

Wasn't there a guy who left his estate to his dog? Employed a coterie of blond playmates to amuse the animal until it's demise.

Anyway, I hope Lagerfeld had some joy in his life, although he never looked like he did.

Jameela Jamil has a respectful chat about Lagerfeld with Cara Delevingne.
posted by asok at 10:46 AM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


before clicking: "I bet this FPP is here just so people can shit all over it."

after clicking: "Yep."
posted by CyberSlug Labs at 10:47 AM on February 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


I'm still disappointed that Werner Herzog didn't direct Lagerfeld Confidential.
posted by pxe2000 at 10:49 AM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]


before clicking: "I bet this FPP is here just so people can shit all over it."

I try to live so that people won't remember me as a monster when I go.
posted by maxsparber at 11:32 AM on February 20, 2019 [11 favorites]


.
posted by filtergik at 11:36 AM on February 20, 2019


Karl Lagerfeld remembers Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos in the December 2016/January 2017 issue of Vogue Paris. "These photos were taken by Antonio Lopez in 1976. I cannot believe it's me! I look like a hipster, a little loud. But I had to be a bit avant-garde all the same because I feel that the young people today resemble these pictures. I was very fond of Antonio, and he lived for five years with me in Saint-Germain and we spent a lot of time together in Saint-Tropez. We were a gang with Juan Ramos, Donna Jordan, Jane Forth ... We were partying at Club Sept, la Coupole and we dressed every night with crazy clothes we found at the flea market, vintage 30s or clothes I had made at a tailor in the 15th arrondissement. It was the beginning of the 70s, it was inspiring, bubbling, very carefree. It must be said that it was before AIDS. I loved that time because money didn't count, and the more diverse the people in a group were, the better."
posted by larrybob at 12:07 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]


Oh wow, he's a real person? I recognized the name from that one achewood comic.
posted by ryanrs at 12:25 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]


^^^Speaking of people to be interested in if this is the type of thing that interests you: Antonio Lopez was an enormously talented and influential fashion illustrator whose work really set the tone for a lot of things you'll recognize from sixties through eighties fashion illustration. Despite his fame and success, he was still working very hard up through the end of his life, both because fame didn't really provide as reliable an income as you'd think and because he was paying for AIDS treatment without, as far as I know, benefit of any insurance. It seems like in the past few years there's been some revival of interest in his life and work, which is exciting.

The Beautiful Fall is a good aggregator of famous names in Parisian and Paris-adjacent fashion from the sixties through eighties - if you're interested in people who had fashion-significant but not hyper-famous-to-everyone careers, it's a good starting point.
posted by Frowner at 12:26 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


I will always admire; and seek to emulate; how so many of our fashion people manage to rock their looks/anima/auras; despite aging, not being particularly 'beauty' in a word so to speak, or being short; or frumpy, or just being a-holes to all around them.

RIP guy; and although I can say I never followed your career; t/y for showing us how we All can carry ourselves to be a unique presence.
posted by Afghan Stan at 12:47 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]


Anna Fitzpatrick, on Twitter: Honestly, shit talking Karl while the body is still warm is the most Karl thing you can do, you are honouring his legacy

Nthing The Beautiful Fall rec because it's a great read, but honestly, this is like when Christopher Hitchens died. A famous person who was sometimes interesting has died, and we are free to be as messy about it as we'd like!
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:11 PM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]




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