Karl Lagerfeld: An icon of the fashion world is dead

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For 30 years, he designed collections, photographed fashion editorials, thought-out advertising campaigns. To take the Jack of all trades, Karl Lagerfeld, was hardly possible. Now the fashion has died icon at the age of 85 years.

The question of his age bored him, said Karl Lagerfeld. And it was also “absolutely sausage”. “I feel young so or so”. Now the fashion guru, who felt eternally young has died. A Person in the environment of the fashion house Chanel, whose creative Director was Lagerfeld, confirmed on Tuesday (19.02.2019) a report of the French magazine “Paris Match”. In January, Lagerfeld had been already on the Chanel fashion show in Paris. The had triggered speculation about his health. An official statement from Chanel is not yet available.

At his age, the guesswork begins. Karl Lagerfeld was on 10. September 2018 really 85 years old? Or 83 or 80? He was at a 10. September born? He didn’t even know it, his birth certificate was burned during the bombardment of Hamburg’s district Altona, he told the tabloid journalist Paul Sahner 2018 in the Interview. Sahner accompanied the fashion guru for 15 years, and came to him close like no other. While Lagerfeld himself in his last years in 1935 as the year of his birth stated (previously, it was a long, 1938), excerpts from the Hamburg parish register, as well as a birth announcement, that he saw already in 1933, the light of the world.

From a child from a good home

Inside Karl Lagerfeld is born in a wealthy family. The father was a manufacturer of canned milk, and lives with his wife, Karl Lagerfeld, and his sister in the Hamburg district of Blankenese. Aristocrats, pretty villas and well-kept parks that surround the young Karl. As Hamburg is bombed in July 1944, the family on your Well in Schleswig-Holstein. There, on the Land, he spends most of his Childhood, his origin, his sense for unusual clothes and for the conditions of the long hair between the simple peasant children.

Even his house cat is a Model and Social Media Star: Karl Lagerfeld with “Choupette”

Even otherwise, the small Karl is quite extraordinary: Even before his Training, he learns English and French; in the attic he tries for hours, the drawings from the Simplicissimus imitate; during his Hamburg time he goes instead of in the school rather in the Kunsthalle, where he is fascinated by the French painters: “in My case, everything that was French was. I wanted to and because I wanted to go, and that’s why I learned French as a child, otherwise I would not be able to go to school,” he tells filmmaker Gero von Boehm in the documentation of “Germany, your artists – Karl Lagerfeld” (2014).

Paris – the Mecca for young fashion designers

Over the years, the desire is to go to Paris to be getting bigger and bigger. A Dior Look, which he attended in 1950 in Hamburg, sealed the decision final. In 1953, he and his mother to pull. For the budding Couturier is the fashion capital of the Its exactly the Right thing. Without detours, it goes uphill for him there steep: at just 20 years of age, he occupied with a coat draft for first place in a fashion competition. Even Yves Saint Laurent is taking part, but ends up only on the third rank.

The taylored design of this wool coat by Karl Lagerfeld in 1954 at the exhibition “Karl Lagerfeld. Fashion Method” (Federal Art Hall In Bonn, 2015)

A few years later, he must start at Pierre Balmain and Jean Patou, proves, and, in 1963, for the first time as Artistic Director: At Chloé, he is now setting new Trends, founded in 1967 about the “Total Look”, the unit of clothing and accessories. Also Fendi in Rome like what the young Designer from Germany created and bound him in the mid-1960s for his fur – and leather collection.

In 1976, Lagerfeld is famous for its Dandy Look. As the preferred styles, as he calls the 18. Century and the Art Deco movement. Until today, his distinctive style of dress, the braid, the he powders, and the dark sunglasses are his trademark.

Karl Lagerfeld Fashion Show in Paris, 1983

If Karl Lagerfeld isn’t working on new designs, he goes into the cafes and bookstores of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Several books he buys there every week. In addition to fashion, you are his greatest passion. In the meantime, he has a collection of around 300,000 copies, including picture books about fashion and art, but also poetry, because he is reading is preferred. “My favorite weekend is when I can look at my books, which I bought in the week,” says the fashion guru. “Scroll and read, make notes, in between, in front of me right daydream, draw, and sleep, and don’t know how late it is!”

New coat of paint for Chanel

In 1983, Lagerfeld is no longer land the big Coup: Chanel, fashion technically, at the time, quite on the pulse of the time, makes it to his creative Director. Karl – ambitious as he is – manages, the Haute Couture and Prêt-à-porter collections of modern appear and make the fashion house also for younger women attractive. He uses new colors, modified the sections, working with other materials. Chanel without it? Meanwhile, unimaginable.

However, the entry in the famous tradition, the house does not seem to meet the fashion Creator. In 1984, he founded his own Label called “Karl Lagerfeld”, which offers everything from men – about women – to children’s fashion and accessories. In 2018, he brings a collection with the 17-year-old Kaia Gerber, Model and daughter of Cindy Crawford out said. You’ll bring a “fresh, Cool-Girl Touch in Karls effortless classics,” it says on the Homepage. The man knows how marketing works.

Vain, but full of self-irony: Lagerfeld, the Jack of all trades

Since 1987 Lagerfeld photographed himself, thinks of advertising campaigns, and turning short corporate films for various fashion of. He constantly seeks new challenges, whether it be to design a Hotel in China or to set up a book publishing company. “The rest, what you did, because you can wrap it right away,” he says in his usual dry manner in the documentation of “Germany, your artists”.

Karl Lagerfeld in Paris, 2018

A setback he suffered in 1989, when his life Jacques de Basher companion dies of Aids. Lagerfeld is increasing rapidly and plunges into even more work. He created several collections under his own name and opened in Paris, “Lagerfeld Gallery”, the fashion salon, and a photo gallery at the same time. In the year 2000, he decided to change his eating habits, and proves a will of iron: In only 13 months Lagerfeld takes 42 pounds. He didn’t want to fit in the slim-fitting Dior suits by Hedi Slimane, he tells Paul Sahner.

Lagerfeld, the critic

Karl Lagerfeld is known for his open words be known: In the French TV show “Salut les Terriens” in channel C8 of fashion designers in 2017, criticized the German refugee policy: The Muslim refugees to be enemies of the Jews. When making the decision to leave in 2015, around one Million refugees into the country, with Chancellor Angela Merkel “suddenly, the pastor’s daughter came,” said Lagerfeld. The question of the host whether this decision should be seen against the Background of the Second world war and Germany’s role in the Greece crisis as an Image of care, replied in the affirmative Lagerfeld and announced, to say “something Terrible”: “You can’t kill millions of Jews and, even if decades apart, later, millions of your worst enemies to the country.” A few months later, he was again critical of the German refugee policy, and threatened with the return of his German citizenship.

Lagerfeld, a total work of art

Its slim line, he held to the last. Also his Look of tight-fitting pants, jacket, shirt with stand-up collar, ponytail, sunglasses, gloves and rings, he remained faithful. Even if it is in the last few months – as we now know, for health reasons – calmer around him: His statements to the Public nicknames were clever and provocative as ever. Karl Lagerfeld is a total work of art, “abstraction”, as he once said of himself. This “abstraction” was full of contradictions: Karl Lagerfeld was vain and imperious on the one side, and showed self-irony and warm-heartedness on the other.