Man in gloves: How we will remember Karl Lagerfeld
Text: Anna Aristova
The news of the death of Karl Lagerfeld swept thunder on media and social networks, stopping at the threshold of the famous boutique on Cambon Street, where fans have brought white roses since yesterday. Rumors about the designer's illness appeared as early as January, when Karl unexpectedly did not go out to everyone after the couture Chanel show, then representatives of the house explained that he was just tired. Instead, the right-hand couturier Virginie Villard, who worked with Lagerfeld for the last thirty years and went from an intern to a studio director — the owner of the house, Alain Wertheimer — appeared on the catwalk and entrusted the post of the new creative director of the house, breaking off speculations about this post in social networks in the first hours after the news - from Phoebe Failo to Albert Elbaz, and on the sidelines they even said that Olivier Rustin was ready to leave the post in Balmain for the sake of this post). When the problem with the successor was resolved, the question arose - what now will be with the cat Shupett, which the designer almost bequeathed his condition?
Lagerfeld ironically called himself a "working class" and was a really zealous person. In addition to the home of Chanel, for which he created eight collections a year, including all off-season rulers (the number of bows for which approached one hundred), Lagerfeld worked on the brands Fendi under his jurisdiction (the designer served as creative director of the Italian brand since 1965) and Karl Lagerfeld, as well as photography, cinema, bookstore and publishing house 7L, and even painted monthly political cartoons for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine - and that’s not all. “I want to work more than others - so that they feel their worthlessness,” said Lagerfeld. "My motivation is to work for the process itself, and not to get results. It's great when you have the opportunity to do what you like and never get bored. I'm not bored at all. I am interested in many things - even more than before "- told Lagerfeld to the chief editor of BoF Imran Amed. The manufacturer of the canonically bourgeois tweed costume at one time initiated one of the first collaborations with H & M.
It is a well-known fact that the library of Karl Lagerfeld numbered about three hundred thousand books (at the same time he remembered the exact location of almost every one of them), and the designer himself noticed that there are “few as informed people” in the world as he is. This did not prevent Lagerfeld from making a lot of ambiguous, sometimes even insulting statements during the journey: he spoke in favor of prostitution, walked around the figure of Adele and Pippa Middleton's face (he himself became the role model of the “Karl Lagerfeld diet”, losing 40 kilograms in a year, to fit in Edie Sliman’s costumes, he called women's sports pants “a symbol of defeat” and forbade women to wear “pink”. He did not like tattoos, short people and political correctness.
However, in the memory of the industry, he will forever remain a French national treasure, a man in black glasses and fingerless gloves, a mastodon and the last pillar of that very fashionable era - when the woman’s tuxedo was a provocation, and not a cheeky inscription on a sweatshirt.
Cover: Dasha Chertanova