As a private company,Chanel guards its figures ferociously, but factoring in
perfumes (Chanel No 5 remains a global best-seller eight decades after its
launch), bags, cosmetics, shoes and jewellery, it ranks among the world’s
top three luxury houses. At 69 (or 74, he is uncharacteristically coy, or
deliberately mysterious when it comes to his age, but whatever it is, he
seems both youthful and curiously ageless), Lagerfeld has enough clout even
with teenagers for his H&M collection to incite near riots.
So we return to that question of indulgence, because this is a man who not
only collects – and sheds – possessions like a bulimic (a sale at Christie’s
of discarded 18th-century furniture and artwork from one of his houses in
2000 pocketed $21.7 million) but is also one whom it would be unwise to
cross. This is because, as he said in Lagerfeld Confidential, the
documentary doing the rounds of arthouse cinemas, he likes the Sword of
Damocles hovering above his friendships. “That way you never take one
another for granted.”
Those who cross him rarely get away with it. “Fashion is about elimination,”
he says, and he probably applies this principle elsewhere. “I’m good at
cutting people off. Revenge is one of my less pleasant pastimes. I can wait
ten years and then pull the chair. Sometimes people don’t even know that it
was me who pulled it. Some are not even worth the effort. Others are so
mediocre that life takes care of them anyway.” All this is delivered with a
spectacularly avuncular chuckle. When I remark that I’ve never seen him
without his sunglasses, he pulls them down his nose momentarily – just long
enough for me to observe that disappointingly, far from glow-in-the-dark red
eyes, his are a rather clear brown.
I’m beginning to seewhy a lost soul like Lindsay Lohan said that she would
like him to adopt her. For there is an internal logic to everything that he
says. It might be ruthlessly brutal, but it is remarkably lacking in
sentimentality and crackling with brittle humour. His is a heady mix of
culture (he speaks five languages, scattering references to 16th-century
poets, 20th-century philosophers and 21st-century actresses in all of them)
intelligence and frivolity that flatters those swept up in his orbit into a
sense of security. His team also has the satisfaction of knowing that
working at Chanel is still creatively exhilarating. While Armani, Saint
Laurent and Valentino, his peers from the 1970s, formulated their visions
decades ago, Lagerfeld, when he has a mind to, reinvents his, sometimes
recklessly so. Perhaps when he says: “I don’t take it seriously. I don’t
talk about my art. I love it, I’m a clothes freak and I’m good on the job
because I know more than other people technically, but you really don’t have
to cry over taffeta. I’d never call myself a great designer,” he means it.
Lagerfeld’s supreme genius is for reinvention, for subversion (a Chanel
cocktail dress is never simply a beautiful dress, it always carries a whiff,
however subliminal, of bourgeois depravity, complete with frequent religious
references) and for transmogrifying street trends into irresistible clothes
with immense price tags.
But he can also, when he’s in the mood, conjure up ethereally beautiful
clothes – especially for Chanel’s couture collections – that almost glow
with an exquisite lightness. He was one of the first to retreat from couture
in the 1960s, when it had become a trope for all that was staid and passé.
But now that it is bought by a tiny elite who are only too happy to nurture
its creative waywardness, he finds it thoroughly engaging again. He didn’t
like the 1990s much (he spent part of it grieving for de Bascher) and the
minimalist years of that decade pushed Chanel, and thus Lagerfeld, into the
margins. But the need to renew rescued him and the brand, which is more
desirable than ever.
Renewal is why he still has the stomach to refashion the classic Chanel 2.55
quilted bag as an alcohol ankle-tag holder, why he can be bothered to house
40 iPods with every genre of music known, why, having all but ended his
formal education at 14, he became an autodidact, why he will never stop
working and why, presumably, he allowed the young director Rodolphe Marconi
unprecedented access to film him for months for Lagerfeld Confidential.
“Oh that,” he says dismissively. “It shows nothing. It was a game – I like
being a puppeteer.”
I’m not sure that the film is as unrevealing as he maintains. If nothing else,
it hints at a solitude away from the madding crowd that could turn quite
dark. His world view can certainly be bleak. “We deserve nothing, least of
all happiness,” he says at one point, explaining where his godchildren go
wrong. “Like most young people they expect too much. Everything has to be so
emotional today. Emotion is so overrated.”
Does he mean this, or is it for effect? Should we resort to Freud to explain
that the famous acquisitiveness is trying to fill some kind of hole, or
assume that the houses, furniture, and the 19 trunks he packs for a week’s
trip are wily affectations to entertain the press. Lagerfeld is not a fan of
Freud. “Psychoanalysis kills creativity. It’s just a way for people to get
some attention from someone other than themselves for an hour.”
The film allowed him more control than last year’s book The Beautiful
Fall, Alicia Drake’s account of Saint Laurent and Lagerfeld, which
contradicted the latter’s own account of his upbringing, and angered him to
the extent that he took legal action against what he saw as an invasion of
privacy.
Officially, he was born in 1938 and raised in the countryside outside Hamburg
in considerable splendour. (Although he now says that he’s saving the full
story for a posthumous autobiography, “and there will be some surprises,
nothing is quite what everyone thinks”.) His father, the one with the
Calvinist work ethic, owned a condensed-milk factory. His mother, the one
with the unconventional approach to child-rearing, told him to speak faster
because, while he was 6, she wasn’t, and if he wished to maintain her
attention, he’d have to learn to precis. “Harsh, yes. One had to fight for
her attention. But she was the perfect mother for me.”
Clearly their relationship worked. He liked his mother’s style, not just her
contempt for the 1950s (“she vomited over all that phoney elegance”), but
the fact that she stood up for him when one of his teachers demanded that he
get his hair cut. “She said ‘What are you, a Nazi?’ That was pretty shocking
for the time.” She liked his precocity – he certainly learnt how to amuse
her more than his sisters, “in whom”, he says matter-of-factly, “no one was
interested”. Surrounded by adults from another century (his godfather, “the
chicest man I ever saw”, was born in 1868 and once slapped Lagerfeld around
the face because he’d never heard of Ferdinand Freiligrath, a minor German
poet), it doesn’t require a huge leap of the imagination to understand why
he didn’t forge lasting bonds with the local children.
