The Master

Over the past 35 years, Karl Lagerfeld has revitalised the house of Chanel while staying true to its founder’s original vision. Now, the legendary designer opens up to Justine Picardie about his disciplinarian mother, his training as a couturier in 1950s Paris and why he hates old dresses but welcomes ghosts into his home.

- Justine Picardie

IN THE TWO DECADES since I first met Karl Lagerfeld, he has always refused to be pinned down about the details of his past, or what he might be planning for the future. “I feel no remorse and no regrets,” he declared on one occasion. “I have amnesia when it comes to the past.” On another, he remarked: “The last thing I’d do is define myself. Tomorrow I could be the opposite of what I am today.”

Even so, during those and other encounters, Lagerfeld has always seemed to me to be entirely himself: witty, perceptive, sharp as a knife, yet more often than not, unexpectedly kind. But if he is, as he chooses to be, indefinable, then perhaps the wisest course is to describe him as I find him, on this most recent meeting, which takes place in his creative studio at Chanel, on rue Cambon. It’s a Friday evening, and the building is unusually quiet, during a brief limbo between two major shows (a beautifully elegiac A/W 2018 collection that I’d seen the previous month, and a more light-hearted cruise presentation, the details of which Lagerfeld had been finalising that afternoon).

In all but one respect, he looks exactly the same as always — regal in a high-collared starched white shirt, jet-black jeans, tailored black jacket, freshly powdered white hair — except his monochrome uniform has been softened by a silver beard. It gives him an unexpectedly gentle aspect; so much so that I have to stop myself reaching out to stroke it. I wonder aloud if his beloved cat, Choupette, likes her owner having whiskers that are the same colour as her fur. “Yes!” Karl says, delightedly. “The one thing she doesn’t like is when I sleep and I turn my back on her — she gets furious.”