How Karl Lagerfeld Became Master of the Celebrity Fashion Universe

"Why should I stop working?" Karl Lagerfeld once said with his characteristic brusqueness. "If I do, I'll die and it'll all be finished."

So, the German designer worked for as long as he could, serving as creative director of Chanel, Fendi and his own eponymous line until his death on Feb. 19, 2019, at the age of 85. But as the 2023 Met Gala will illustrate, nothing is finished when it comes to Lagerfeld's impact on the fashion world.

The famous and famously chic will be paying homage in accordance with the night's theme, "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty," meaning we can expect a parade of haute couture inspired by the mercurial visionary's exacting ways around a silhouette.

Calling him "a friend, a consummate artist, a paradox" in a recent tribute, Vogue editor-in-chief and Met Gala chair Anna Wintour wrote, "And he, of course, declared that fashion didn't belong in a museum—it should look ahead, not be consigned to history." However, she added, "I'm at peace with the small role I've played in this last contradiction because I know he would have loved being recognized—and there's simply no one more deserving."

Lagerfeld himself served as a co-chair or honorary chair several times over the years, including in 2005 when the theme was "The House of Chanel," the exhibition coming five years after it was originally scheduled. The official reason given for its 2000 cancellation was the untimely death of Richard Martin, who was head curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. But, as the New York Times reported in 2000, a bit of a head-butt with Lagerfeld over artistic control of the exhibition wasn't not a factor.

But as with all the other prickly interludes that punctuate the Lagerfeld lore, it all ended up so much water under the bridge.

Because over the course of 65 years in the fashion business, including half a century as one of the most preeminent names in couture, Lagerfeld was famous for many things. Being polite or mincing words wasn't one of them.

He made questionable comments about a range of seemingly unimpeachable pop culture figures, from Meryl Streep to Adele to Princess Diana, but though he let it fly when he saw fit, anyone who gave fig about fashion clamored to wear his clothes, particularly the über-iconic Chanel label that in recent years counted Kristen Stewart, Keira Knightley and Tilda Swinton as muses. 

Madonna stuck up for Adele in 2012 when she called Lagerfeld's comments about the singer's body "horrible," but it's not as though she threw away her fingerless Chanel gloves afterward. (Lagerfeld, who had called Adele "a little too fat," later called himself the English singer's "greatest admirer" and insisted his quote was taken out of context.)

"Maybe he wanted to be in the paper? Maybe he doesn't understand what I do?" Heidi Klum wondered after Lagerfeld told German GQ in 2009 that he didn't know her and that she wasn't famous in France. "It's bizarre to me that he says he doesn't know who I am because he's dressed me in the past. I've worn Karl Lagerfeld." She added, "You can't please everybody, and you can't live your life wanting to please everybody either."

But in 2012, Klum and Lagerfeld looked perfectly friendly at amfAR's Cinema Against AIDS gala in Cannes—and Klum remained a fan of Chanel accessories, particularly the timeless handbags.

And then there was the brouhaha involving Streep, who's usually not one to be involved in feud rumors, which turned into a rare occasion in which Lagerfeld admitted to getting it wrong on his end.

For the 2017 Oscars, which marked her 20th nomination, she chose a glittering blue Elie Saab creation, but before that she had firmly eviscerated Lagerfeld's claim that she had been planning to wear custom Chanel—that is, until she found a designer who would pay her for the honor of wearing their dress on the red carpet.

"We give them dresses, we make the dresses, but we don't pay," he told Women's Wear Daily. "A genius actress, but cheapness also, no?"

In response, Streep said in a statement that he had no less than defamed her and members of her team—prompting his eventual mea-culpa-esque explanation.

"Chanel engaged in conversations with Ms. Streep's stylist, on her request, to design a dress for her to wear to the Academy Awards," Lagerfeld said in a statement. "After an informal conversation, I misunderstood that Ms. Streep may have chosen another designer due to remuneration, which Ms. Streep's team has confirmed is not the case. I regret this controversy and wish Ms. Streep well with her 20th Academy Award nomination."

The at-times scathing candor that could make him sound at times as if he'd gone off the rails stemmed from the same personality that made him the fearless fashion genius that he was, one who remained a taste-maker for women and men a quarter of his age.

 

"Karl has always, from the very beginning, made me feel like being myself was the right thing to do. And in [the fashion] world, that is a rarity," Stewart, a Lagerfeld muse and Chanel ambassadress, told V Magazine in 2017. "He's a compulsive and obsessive artist and it's contagious. And he's kind. He is who he is for a reason. I feel so lucky to be in his space so often."

Stewart, clad in a black leather quilted jacket and cashmere top from the Chanel Paris-Cosmopolite 2016/17 collection and a black silk and lace skirt from the Spring-Summer 2017 Ready-to-Wear collection, attended the Chanel and Charles Finch 9th annual Pre-Oscar Dinner at Madeo in West Hollywood the night before the 2017 Oscars.

Brand ambassador Pharrell Williams, who did wear Chanel to the Oscars that year, was also at the dinner, as were Hailee Steinfeld, Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Stella Maxwell, Poppy Delevingne, Lily Collins, Adrien Brody, and Jamie Dornan and wife Amelia Warner.

In a world where the turnover at the top of the most storied design houses in the world rivals the swapping of players among pro sports teams, Lagerfeld was as close as fashion had to an immovable force, a bridge to the past and the "old ways" but also someone who never stopped plowing relentlessly forward, uncannily knowing what the most immaculately dressed people in the world aspired to wear at every turn.

"You wouldn't think it was couture. That's what I found groundbreaking," French actress and filmmaker Helène Fillières said after the Chanel Spring/Summer 2014 Couture show in January 2014, also attended by Swinton and Lily Allen and opened by Cara Delevingne. "It was perfectly adapted to women of today."

That being said, Lagerfeld knew no one was going to pay, in this day and age, for anything less than the entire white-glove experience—couture as a way of life, rather than just an outfit.

"Couture is about service, the salon, the vendeuse, the box and the way the clothes are wrapped and presented to the client," he told The New York Times in 2003. "It is a package deal."

Knightley got married in May 2013 in a short, strapless Chanel party dress with a layered tulle skirt that was the stuff of our cotton-candy-fueled dreams—and then she recycled the look for a red carpet in London that December, black tights underneath giving it a grunge-chic look.

Calling the dress "very simple," Lagerfeld described Knightley's nuptials as "perfect" and "the least pretentious wedding ever."

The designer also praised Knightley's performance as Coco Chanel in his short film Once Upon a Time—a marked upgrade, in his opinion, from Audrey Tautou's portrayal in the BAFTA- and César-nominated biopic Coco Before Chanel.

"Oh, the movie was bad. She played it like women's lib, like Simone de Beauvoir 30 years before The Second Sex. No, no, no, no. Chanel was a different kind of woman," he told The Telegraph of the Amelie star's take. "Keira had it. She is a young woman in love, not a spinster."

Stewart played a version of Coco in another Lagerfeld-directed, 11-minute film, Once and Forever, shown at Chanel's Métiers d'Art show in December 2015.

"Karl is supremely natural and thoughtful, which rubs off on an actor, always...that confidence," she told Vogue about the experience. "His interest in cinema is clear and working with him in that way was inspiring...to see him in yet another shade of light, thriving...'Once more—with feeling.'"

Despite what could be interpreted as his shocking comments about a woman's looks or style, he was the epitome of someone who consided a woman's entire being before forming any opinion about her whatsoever. The women who inspired his creativity or piqued his intellect were more than just an assortment of parts on which to display his clothes.

"[We are] easily in a period of over-retouching," Lagerfeld observed in 2013 in a talk at Lincoln Center, per Fashionista. "[It makes] some models look as if they are coming out of a funeral parlor, all life taken out of the face, I hate that."

He told the Times in 2015 that Julianne Moore was his idea of the perfect woman.

"I don't know [why]," he said. "I just think she's great. Her whole life; the way she is in life. And Jessica Chastain—she's great, too. Of the younger generation, I love Kristen Stewart. She is gifted. She looks tough but in fact she's the nicest person in the world."

Moore wore Chanel to the 2015 Oscars, when she won Best Actress for Still Alice, and again to the 2016 Oscars when she presented.

Chastain, a longtime friend, actually conducted the aforementioned interview with Lagerfeld at Lincoln Center. Asked what he did for fun, he quipped, "I admire people who destroy themselves."

When the NY Times asked in 2015 what young designers he currently liked, he only named one—Alexander McQueen creative director Sarah Burton, who designed Kate Middleton's wedding gown. (And of course, his beloved cat Choupette, whom Lagerfeld has credited with making him a better person, is a girl.) 

But though he didn't lavish praise on just anybody, Lagerfeld was hardly fusty or suspicious of youth, instead interpreting the trends of tomorrow through a seasoned lens that had seen the entire arc of fashion since the 1950s and was not afraid of the future. Subsequently, Lagerfeld knew an It Girl when he saw her, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Delevingne, Lily-Rose Depp and Willow Smith being Chanel favorites in his later years.

Diane Kruger, a beauty ambassador for the brand and a devotee for years, called the "Chanel woman" a "subtle woman, a cultivated woman, a free woman"—an aura developed by Coco Chanel and held firmly in place by the guiding hand of Lagerfeld.

"More than anyone I know, he represents the soul of fashion: restless, forward-looking and voraciously attentive to our changing culture," Wintour said when presenting Lagerfeld with the Outstanding Achievement Award at the 2015 British Fashion Awards, a year after she had received the honor. "It was Karl who realized, earlier than most, that ready-to-wear wasn't just couture-lite, but the vibrant center of the new, accomplished woman's lifestyle."

"His vision is so incredible, and the fact that he still references back to Coco Chanel's visions and traditions, the merging of the two, the fact that he's able to manage that is really remarkable," gushed Blake Lively at the 2010 opening of the Chanel boutique in SoHo during New York Fashion Week, an event crawling with his A-list fans, including Kruger, Rachel Bilson, Sarah Jessica Parker and Paula Patton.

"He's sort of in an incredible universe of his own," Parker said. "I just think he's been really smart about it and really interesting."

"I mean," Bilson added, "he's iconic."

In a joint interview with Lagerfeld published in May 2016 in Harper's Bazaar, Jenner recalled meeting him for the first time.

"Before I met him, well, when you think of Karl Lagerfeld, someone that amazing, you sort of don't think they actually exist," the model said. And she didn't mind that he wasn't aware of why she was initially famous.

"We don't have [Keeping Up With the Kardashians] here," Lagerfeld said. "I didn't even know she was in it. I saw it when it was only her sisters and she was, like, a baby."

"I love that, Kendall said. "That's so refreshing to me."

When Lagerfeld didn't appear to take his customary bow at the end of Chanel's two shows during Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week in January 2019, it signaled the end of an era.

His death a few weeks later after a private battle with cancer triggered an outpouring of remembrances from the endless list of celebrities, fellow designers and influencers who called him a friend, frenemy or inspiration.

"One day it will be over and I don't care," Lagerfeld told T, The New York Times Style Magazine, in 2015. "As my mother used to say, 'There is one God for everybody and all the religions are shops.'"

Said the man who hasn't been consigned to history just yet.

(Originally published March 2, 2017, at 12:57 p.m.)

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