The Great Fashion Designers (27 page)

Lagerfeld works at a feverish pace, producing a flood of detailed sketches, a veritable torrent of creativity. A Lagerfeld collection, for whichever label, is marked by clear ideas expressed with confidence and assurance, often with a high degree of wit. His debut for Chanel in 1983 was a triumph, the star piece a trompe l'oeil silk crepe dress featuring jewellery-effect embroidery by Lesage, a playful reference to Madame Chanel's delight in jewellery. For inspiration, his first Chanel collection looked back primarily to the 1920s and 1930s rather than to Chanel's post-war comeback. His extravagant use of Chanel's interlocking C motifs was there from the start. While there were always some ready to dismiss Lagerfeld's style as baroque showmanship sharing more in common with Chanel's arch-rival Elsa Schiaparelli, by the end of the 1980s few could seriously challenge Lagerfeld's position at the top of the fashion pyramid, particularly with Yves Saint Laurent close to retirement.

Over the years, Lagerfeld's designs for Chanel have drawn from all periods of the fashion house's history, often with unexpected juxtapositions, such as denim jeans mixed with a classic soft tweed jacket or a heavy leather biker jacket with a silk tulle ball gown. Lagerfeld's design aesthetic has always been brasher than the original Chanel—whether reflected in an intense colour palette for tweeds or in flashy luxury bags and other accessories or in a constant willingness to appropriate street style. But Lagerfeld's oft strident aesthetic has reflected a more strident age. ‘I took her code, her language and mixed it all up,' he said in 2004. Humour is one of the most potent weapons in the Lagerfeld armoury. Anna Piaggi, a fashion eccentric of the first order, was drawn to Lagerfeld by his playful eclecticism: the first Lagerfeld-designed dress in her wardrobe was in silk embroidered with sequins with a motif of an art deco pop jukebox.

Lagerfeld grew up accustomed to money and luxury and never experienced the financial hardships of many of his contemporaries. He was born Karl Otto Lagerfeldt in Hamburg, Germany, the son of a Swedish business magnate who had made a substantial fortune in the condensed milk industry. He claims a birth date of 1938, although baptismal records suggest he was delivered five years earlier in 1933. His German mother, Elizabeth, was a formative influence on the young designer, a demanding personality who shaped her son to develop a similar iron will and continued to be an important force in his life until her death at the age of 81 in 1978. He moved with his mother to Paris in 1953, making his big breakthrough two years later when he won an International Wool Secretariat award for a coat. The young Yves Saint Laurent won the dress award, setting the stage for two careers that marched in parallel through the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Lagerfeld's path to glory was, however, much slower than Saint Laurent's. The coat award in 1955 enabled Lagerfeld to land his first job at Pierre Balmain, from where he moved to Jean Patou after three years. But he was quickly bored and left within a year in a significant shift from the world of couture to ready-to-wear, freelancing for names ranging from Krizia, Charles Jourdan and Mario Valentino to supermarket chain Monoprix. He was avowedly a
styliste
—the French word for a designer who worked for ready-to-wear labels. That put him, in the eyes of the oft snobbish world of French fashion, at a considerably lower level than the couturier Yves Saint Laurent. Lagerfeld's response was to celebrate his role as
styliste
, deriding the craft of haute couture as old-fashioned and backward-looking. The fierce professional rivalry turned deeply personal in the 1970s when Saint Laurent had an affair with Jacques de Bascher, the long-term amour of Lagerfeld.

Ever restless, Lagerfeld was briefly disillusioned by the world of fashion design for a period in the early 1960s and moved to Italy in 1964 to study art. Within three years, however, he was back in fashion at the house of Fendi, forming a bond with the Fendi family that has lasted even longer than the Chanel connection. From 1964, he also worked fruitfully with the ready-to-wear house of Chloé under the guidance of founder Gaby Aghion, who taught him how to edit and simplify the flood of designs he was producing. In the 1970s, his work for Chloé established him as one of international fashion's leading designers. The 1972 Deco collection, featuring black-and-white prints and inspired bias-cut dresses, received universal acclaim. For ten years, as chief designer at Chloé, he produced
a stream of collections that summed up the fashion spirit of the period, leading to his appointment at Chanel in 1982. He briefly returned to Chloé in 1993, although less successfully.

Lagerfeld's talents extend beyond fashion design into photography and illustration—and no doubt he would be his own best biographer. Speaking to Roger Tredre in 1994, though, he said he would never write his story for a simple reason—‘I could not write the truth.' Author Alicia Drake was brave enough to exhaustively research Lagerfeld's rivalry with Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s in her book,
The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris
(2006). Lagerfeld felt wounded by the book, taking legal action which resulted in its withdrawal in France by publishers Bloomsbury.

Restless and easily bored, Lagerfeld is the German outsider who became the ultimate insider in the gossipy world of Parisian fashion. He is a media dream, accessible and obliging, enthusiastically ready with a pithy quote and a pleasure in stirring up mischief. His wide-ranging interests and exceptional gift for languages make him a one-man publicity machine for whichever label he is representing. He has a sense of theatre (indeed, he has designed costumes for theatre, opera and cinema), invariably arriving fashionably late for appointments, usually in a flurry of energy and impatience, borne with equanimity by his colleagues in the Chanel atelier. His showmanship and extraordinary speed of work were both depicted admirably in the French television documentary,
Signé Chanel
, first screened in 2005. He has been admired (and sometimes mocked) as a fashion spectacle in his own right. In the 1950s, Lagerfeld used to drive a cream open-top Mercedes, a present from his father, and wear high heels and carry clutch bags on holiday in Saint-Tropez. Fifty years on, his spectacular diet was partly linked to his desire to squeeze into the slim-line tailoring of Hedi Slimane, the young designer at Dior Homme whose work he has championed. He has often expressed a cultural affinity with the cultivated aristocrats of eighteenth-century Europe, even half-jesting that in a previous life he was an eighteenth-century gentleman.

Much of Karl Lagerfeld has remained a mystery, the real man behind the fast-talking ‘Kaiser' often obscured from view by the media persona. His predilection for dark glasses or the protective carapace of a fan suggests that this is the way he prefers it. Perhaps the truth is not so complicated—his life is his work. Certainly that has appeared to be the reality since the death of his long-time close friend Jacques de Bascher in 1989. On the subject of work, Lagerfeld has said: ‘You have to remember that I do nothing else. That's how I manage. Twenty-four hours a day. I don't go on holiday.' Lagerfeld's offence at Alicia Drake's exploration of his rivalry with Saint Laurent in the 1970s was clearly deep. Drake sought to delve deep into the Lagerfeld psyche, soliciting comments from a wide variety of sources. She explored his many personal rivalries and his recurring tendency to fall out with even the closest of friends, ranging from Gaby Aghion at Chloé to the model Inès de la Fressange. On his obsession with youth, Drake quoted an anonymous former colleague: ‘If you want to understand Karl, you have to understand his fear of death … He talks about the future non-stop because when he looks at the past he realises that life is behind him and there is only a small portion ahead. This is what makes him work so hard.'

As a designer, he has consistently set new standards for productivity and energy, driving fashion forward into the modern age. He also created a template that was followed by Tom Ford at Gucci and a host of modern designers, showing how fashion and fashion labels can be endlessly revived and made relevant for every new generation.

Further reading:
Alicia Drake's
The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris
(2006), which was withdrawn from publication in France, provides many interesting insights into Lagerfeld in the 1970s. Lagerfeld has been interviewed innumerable times, including by Roger Tredre for
The Observer
newspaper (‘Kaiser Karl', 7 August 1994).

A fashion lover would say that fashion's minimalists have their moments and then become boring. If James Laver was right and ‘clothes are the furniture of the mind made visible', then there is an excess of vacant space in the minds and the imaginations of minimalists. The pragmatists who just want a way to dress that looks elegant, sophisticated and as if they don't wish to make the effort to care much about keeping up with fashion's changes would say they are never boring. Roy Halston Frowick, known simply as Halston, was the minimalist's minimalist. He was granted high status by contemporary commentators, possibly because of his good looks and personal star quality, a phenomenon not really seen again in a fashion designer until Tom Ford; analysts reflecting on the period are more grudging. Patricia Mears, in
Halston
(2001) wrote, ‘Halston was a groundbreaking figure. Best known as a modernist who fully advocated the minimalist aesthetic, Halston turned fashion on its ear in the over-accessorised sixties by blending simple, pared-down silhouettes with the most luxurious fabrics.'

Caroline Rennolds Milbank, who categorised Halston as a ‘purist' in
Couture: The Great Fashion Designers
, wrote that he was the right designer for a certain moment:

Halston began making clothes at a time when it was no longer fashionable to appear rich. The new social climate was one in which Park Avenue and Sutton Place matrons consigned their ‘important' jewels to vaults rather than lose them to muggers; when cultural impresarios were throwing parties for Black Panthers and waging war on the stuffy, the traditional and the formal. Perhaps it is because his sensibility matured during this period of ‘radical chic' that Halston rejected most vestiges of formal dressmaking. Halston makes clothes without zippers or pockets, ruffles or notched lapels, practically without seams.

Roy Halston Frowick was born in 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa, the second son (of four children) of a Norwegian-American accountant with a passion for inventing. Roy developed an interest in sewing from his mother, and as an adolescent he began creating hats and embellishing outfits for his mother and sister. Owing to his father's alcoholism and the difficulties he had remaining in employment, the family moved often, first to Illinois then Indiana. Roy graduated from high school in 1950 and then attended Indiana University for one semester. After the family moved to Chicago in 1952, he enrolled in a night course at the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as a window dresser at the Carson Pirie Scott department store. At this time known as ‘Fro', he began a relationship with André Basil, a celebrity hairdresser twenty-five years his senior whose salon was in Chicago's premier hotel, the Ambassador. Basil gave Fro a corner of the salon for a millinery atelier where he would attract the attention of Basil's clients who included the cream of Chicago's society as well as the celebrated guests who stayed at the hotel.

In 1956 Basil introduced Fro to Lilly Daché, the queen of New York milliners, and by 1958 he was working for her in her Park Avenue establishment. From this point on he used his middle name, Halston. His ambition quickly outstripped Daché's establishment, and he accepted a post as head milliner at Bergdorf Goodman, America's most exclusive store. When Jacqueline Kennedy attended her husband's presidential inauguration in January
1961, she was wearing a coat by Oleg Cassini and a pillbox hat by Halston. The hat was perfectly suited to Mrs Kennedy's rather large head. Unadorned, simple and overwhelmingly youthful, a fitting symbol for a new generation stepping up to power, the hat was one of the most copied items of clothing ever, bought and worn by women across the world.

Generally, Halston's style in millinery was more fanciful than that simple pillbox. Many of his designs bordered on the fantastic; he used mirrors, fringing, jewels and flowers to decorate hoods, bonnets, coifs and helmets. His innovative scarf hat, a silk square on a frame, was a much-copied design of the 1960s. He was an inventive and technically brilliant milliner with a sense of humour. Diana Vreeland said, ‘He was probably the greatest hatmaker in the world. I'd say to him, “H, I had a dream about a hat last night” and I'd go about describing it, and then, by God, he'd give it to me, line by line.'

The chief advantage of working for Bergdorf Goodman, however, was that it opened his eyes to the wider international world of original fashion design. Since the beginning of the century Bergdorf Goodman had boasted a custom design salon where original French designs were copied for clients. As was the now dated way with many American fashion establishments Bergdorf's still sent its designers to Paris twice a year to the haute couture shows to glean ideas and buy toiles. This was to be Halston's equivalent of the Chambre Syndicale school; his ‘sharp eye,' wrote Patricia Mears, ‘greedily absorbed every detail, every cut of a seam in the creations he saw by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy and, his favourite, Cristobal Balenciaga.'