This is Karl Lagerfeld’s idea of a woman’s perfect fantasy, created to provide Dom Pérignon with images for a branding campaign. It’s a delicious tableau, composed by the grande dame of fashion (if you can use that term for a man — and in this case I think you can). And it raises an interesting question: how does a septuagenarian homosexual fashion designer in a powdered ponytail know what women fantasise about? He’s not Nancy Friday. Yet here he is, giving us a heterosexual fantasy that most women — and men — would find immensely satisfying.
“I spend my whole life with women and I know quite well what goes on in their minds,” Lagerfeld says, his rapid, accented English mumbled through fascinatingly fleshy lips. Occasionally, he gives a delicate flutter of his hands, encased in grey fingerless driving gloves that match his signature Hedi Slimane gear. He laughs like Dracula. His eyes are hidden behind visor-like bespoke shades. He revels in political incorrectness, denouncing fat (or “volume”, as he now tactfully calls it) and appending highbrow answers to lowbrow questions with the coda, “But I don’t think you are well informed enough to make a discussion with me about this.” In short, he is a thoroughly evil genius, a piece of fabulous fashion gothic.
He is also, without doubt, the grandfather of modern fashion. For more than 50 years, he has forged a successful career not just as a designer but as a photographer, illustrator, costume designer and troublemaker (it was Lagerfeld who said what everyone was thinking when Stella McCartney moved to Chloé). He worked first for Balmain, then for Patou and for Krizia, before moving to Chloé in the early 1970s, reinventing the house in the dreamy, feminine image that was its signature until McCartney took over. In 1983, he went to head up Chanel, where he took Coco Chanel’s epochal modernisation of women’s fashion and merged it with street style, redefining it for a new generation. During his 40-year relationship with Fendi, he has redefined its fur collections; his spare, androgynous own label, Lagerfeld Gallery, has shops all over the world; and he has recently moved into bridal wear. His reputation is such that, when he recently launched a Karl Lagerfeld diffusion line, the New York stores Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman bought the collection sight unseen.
But what qualifies him to articulate a woman’s sexual fantasies? After all, he (a) is gay — not that he cares to discuss such intimate and, as he sees it, specious labels; and (b) claims not to care for sex much. Lagerfeld likes to play his sex life as irrelevant, as if he has been celibate since his longtime companion, Jacques de Bascher, died of Aids in the late 1980s. Going back even further, there isn’t much to suggest he spent his youth frolicking in the bathhouses of Istanbul. Still, Lagerfeld knows what women want. They want to look beautiful, to look chic. They want to look sexy.
The Eva Herzigova Room Service story, as he calls it, is his second project for Dom Pérignon. The first had a title — 7 Fantasmes of a Woman — so unequivocal as to suggest that Lagerfeld thinks he knows precisely what women want. Featuring a then 36-year-old Helena Christensen and a cast of other beauties, men and barely legal boys, Lagerfeld’s scenes depicted some pretty suggestive situations. “I don’t say that she did it,” he says, “but in her mind — why not? Perhaps she never went with another girl, perhaps she never had two boys at the same time, perhaps she had never tried any very young boys either.”
At least fashion designers know about young boys. The depiction of female sexuality in porn, advertising and fashion appeals, almost always, to a male concept of sex — even when shot by photographers whom women generally love. As Lagerfeld himself says: “Ellen von Unwerth? She is dirty, no?” Describing his 7 Fantasmes pictures, I use the word “naughty”, which he enjoys. “Naughty. Naughty. Such a sweet word from another time. Now everything must be horny or dirty. There is something very flirty about naughty: not too down to earth; more fun.”
Lagerfeld likes to play with people in a neutered form of flirtation. He even plays with me during this interview. Afterwards, he will attend a showing of Room Service at a party in Beverly Hills, where he’ll move around within concentric circles of gawkers, bodyguards and Hollywood A-list totty. Lindsay Lohan will sit on his knee; Paris Hilton will paw him. He is the only person Courtney Love will be polite to.
Truthfully, I find myself beguiled and seduced by Lagerfeld’s take on female sexuality. Beautiful and sexy, it seems expressive of how women really want to feel, and portrays an appealingly idealised view of femaleness. As Lagerfeld puts it: “I prefer to make people look beautiful. I don’t like to represent the ugly side of life. My pictures are a type of fantasy.”
A woman who has worked with some of the biggest names in British fashion (all male, all gay) tells me that all of them had extremely strong relationships with their mothers. “They’d been influenced by women all through their lives. I would trust a gay guy more than a straight man with my fantasies. You have more comfort, more intimacy, with a gay man, because you are never going to be used and abused.”
Lagerfeld says he used Christensen in 7 Fantasmes because she is “someone who is truly feminine and strong. Someone who can carry the erotic atmosphere of the story. I like the idea of an experienced woman. You can see on her face that she has seen a lot, lived a lot and takes a great deal of pleasure in it all”. He likes his women beautiful, yes, but that is not enough. “Flawless people can be very boring and stupid,” he says. They also need style, an appetite and a certain meanness. “My aunt told me my mother’s ambition in life was to be mean to men and to have fun. Cruelty,” he says, “is a kind of game to give some spice to life.”
But it must be the right kind of mean. When I mention Naomi Campbell, Lagerfeld says seriously: “The way she behaves is not very chic. I hate people who let themselves go. I hate drunk women. To keep a certain discipline in life is a good thing.” So, what of Kate Moss, with her hearty appetites for vice of various kinds? She is still worshipped like a goddess. “And so she should be, because the image is controlled. What she projects, everyone would love to do if they had the courage. Girls want to look like her and they want to behave like her. Kate has the courage to be 150% herself; she has something very special, very touching. There is no second Kate Moss. People want to look and be like her, to have that something that is very daring, but it must remain a fantasy for 99% of the world: they don’t have the looks, the circumstances, the thing...”
High fashion, if not high-street fashion, made it clear, after the briefest of moratoria, that it doesn’t care about Kate Moss being caught with either her pants or her nose down. Lagerfeld is delighted by the troubled Hollywood playgirl Lohan, despite — perhaps even because of — the hullabaloo she caused when she sat, as his guest, at Anna Wintour’s table at a recent fashion awards event and reportedly went to the loo six times in two hours, much to Wintour’s fury. For all his protests against “volume”, Mariah Carey “is appéttisante, an absolutely divine person”; and Pamela Anderson is “lovely”. Even her wardrobe? “It is right... for her.”
