We all think we knew Karl Lagerfeld – that’s how large the icon loomed over the cultural Zeitgeist. Those blessed to be in his inner circle included Amanda Harlech, and on Monday night, she paid tribute to the designer – a moment that will go down in the history of the awards as one of the most personal and beautiful moments. We were so touched that we wanted to print her tribute:
“All of us here think we know Karl…..I use the present tense deliberately as he will be with all of us who knew him, and even those who didn’t, for the foreseeable future and beyond.
Karl Lagerfeld. Quixotic, precocious, prolific; one of the most forceful characters and, yes, greatest designers of the 20th and 21st Centuries; indelible as permanent marker.
Karl lived for his work. No class in the end was as important to him as being working class! So profound was his mercurial thinking that he was able to establish a spirit, conjure a different sensibility for each of the houses he designed for.
He would often sit back and wonder at this ability to separate the houses as if he had an enfilade in his design mind, each room differently shaped, and filled with different ideas and even a different light.
We would collapse onto the jet after the Fendi show to fly back from Milan to Paris to ratchet up Chanel, which would show a week later. And when Paris spread herself in a glitter of Haussmann geometry beneath us as we began to land, he would often remark how different Paris was from the Italian cities: More delicate, less sensual, visceral and pigmented; how Chanel could never be Italian nor Fendi French. It was the same to him as trying to translate Rilke into French or Catherine Pozzi into English. Impossible.
He felt the rhythm of place, its voice, its tone so acutely. His work at its best was visual music, sometimes as punctuated as Rap, sometimes as mysterious as Schubert. The clue to Karl was his depth: he could read an emotional skeleton in everyone in the same way that I believe he saw ghosts. He was profoundly sensitive, an astute strategist and an academic. He was his own library of philosophy, interior design, biography, poetry, art, architecture, history and politics which colored his night visions and fuelled his days in his landscape of drifting papers and books.
He was happiest lost in this landscape of his mind. And yet he kept this private. He polished his public appearances so he disappeared behind the black and white. “You see I am recognized everywhere I go….I am like a cartoon of myself, a cypher. I must say I am quite pleased with this dolly.” Powdered hair, dark glasses, stiff collar, tie, tailoring and a glimmer of a Belperron pin – sometimes his Choupette brooch, but always his lucky watch and his mother’s blue signet ring. He had a whole room of Karl portraits, robots, teddy bears, dollies which he never looked at preferring instead his Murakami portrait set in a field of flowers.
He loved performing to an audience – however many friends and journalists, TV and film crews, editors in chief, and celebrities would fill the studio during the final fittings before a show of 98 passages, he would rise to each and every single one and twist them into his own highly-charged foxtrot or rumba. He was energized by the energy of attention. His wit was formidable like his rapid-fire, multi-lingual punning which he could also draw as rebus puzzles. He was in fact his own unique kind of rebus – the public Karl, with the hidden meaning beneath the form. He literally tangoed with light and shade, public and private. He loved the mix in the paradox – like his eclectic playlists, creating new and surprising resonances through juxtaposition and echo. He spliced Corbusier with Baroque, Versailles with Punk, Ancient Egypt with New York. And yet he kept his private world exotically and hermetically private.
When I asked him if he thought he would ever fall deeply in love again in the way that he loved Jacques de Bascher, if some spectre de la rose should leap through the open windows, he replied that he always slept with his windows tightly shut!
It was only when he took off his dark glasses to sketch that I noticed the softness of his light brown eyes, the way they raked the whole room while he was talking to one person as if he was sizing up everyone’s reaction to what was being fitted or what he had said.
Karl was meteoric – a forcefield of lightning ideas and visions. He was his own St Elmo’s fire illuminating everyone around him. He was an artist and had the impatience of a visionary and the practical nowse of an engineer. His clothes were engineered to the limits of their lightness. Karl was never more engaged than when he was working on the making of a collection. His sketches obsessed him. It took hours sometimes for him to find exactly that angle of attitude he was chasing. He would joke about how full his wastepaper basket got. Fittings could be a battle initially until we all understood exactly what was in the sketch. Every millimeter counted. Just as the focus of everyone in the studio, every premier and seconde had to follow Karl’s line entirely, however new and potentially impossible the gravitational challenge. Karl exacted acts of faith and the reward was his absolute loyalty and kindness. And yet he would question and refine his fashion proposition right up to the show. As the applause rose above the Finale music in the Grand Palais and he was about to walk out into the light, he would look at me and say “That doesn’t make the next one,” and in the corners of his magnificent mind even then, en coulisse with the thunder of applause like tremendous waves landing on the shore…he began all over again.”
