The Bite Magazine - issue 16

When speaking of Coco Chanel, a woman whom he agreed was an unpredictable and mercurial personal- ity, a creature of the present, an artist of her time who was in tune with its spirit and its demands, Lagerfeld said, “She wasn’t a has-been, always looking backwards. On the contrary, she hated the past, including her own past and everything sprang from that. That’s why the Chanel brand must stay up-to-date.” Amazedly, Lagerfeld designs eight collections a year for the Chanel fashion house with six of these presented on the catwalk. The next chapter gives details of Karl Lagerfeld’s life, from his birth in Hamburg, Germany in September 1938, his privileged childhood and adolescence having been born into an upper-middle-class family, to his arrival in Paris in 1952 with the aim to devote himself to fashion. After he won the International Woolmark Prize for a design on a coat produced by couturier Pierre Balmain, Lagerfeld became Balmain’s assistant at the age of 17 and worked with him for three years before being named artistic director of the Maison Jean Patou. The creative director’s CV reads like a who’s who in the world of fashion, collaborating with brands such as Charles Jourdan, Krizia, Mario Valentino, and Cadette. Through this, he quickly became a leading figure in the expanding field of ready-to-wear, which at the time was occupying an ever more central role in the fashion business. From 1963 to 1982 and from 1992 to 1997, Lagerfeld focused on designing clothing and accessory lines for the house of Chloé. During this time, he created the fragrance Chloé which was a huge success and became the first designer to launch a perfume without having his own label. In 1965, Lagerfeld collaborated with the Fendi sisters in Rome and revolutionised fashion’s approach to fur, a task that still continues to this day. In 1984, Lagerfeld launched a ready- to-wear label bearing his own name for the very first time, alongside his designs for Chanel and Fendi. The label became Lagerfeld Gallery in 1998 and then rebranded in 2012 to simply Karl Lagerfeld, promoting an accessible vision of luxury available online. His tiresome contribution to fashion awarded him the Couture Council Fashion Visionary Award by the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2010 and was named the most influ- ential designer of the last twenty-five years at the Marie Claire Fashion Awards. Outside the realms of fashion, Lagerfeld has designed costumes for opera and dance productions at La Scala in Milan, Opera di Firenze, the Salzburg Festival and the Opéra de Monte Carlo as well as for cinema. He is also the author of several photogra- phy books and has been the subject of three documentaries: Lagerfeld Confi- dential directed by Rodolphe Marconi in 2007; Un Roel seul directed by Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai in 2008; and Karl Lagerfeld se dessine directed by Loïc Prigent in 2013. The last remaining pages feature images from the collections that Lagerfeld designed for Chanel, from the SS83 ‘Everyone is Talking About Chanel’ down to the current AW15-16 offering ‘Couture Casino’. When speaking about his first col- lection for Chanel, he told Vogue journalist Suzy Menkes,“It’s like doing a revival of an old play. You have to try to see it with the eyes of the first audience, but you should not have too much reverence. It’s important for young people to touch her style – it must be fun.” Looking to Chanel’s 1920s and 1930s designs rather than her familiar 1950s creation, he told Women’s Wear Daily , “A very static image has emerged based on Chanel’s last years, so I’ve looked over her whole career and found something much more interesting” while Vogue reported that the collection was the talk of Paris. He described it as “modern and chic sexy, not Las Vegas- sexy, while the new proportion is longer, thinner. Even if she never did it this way, it’s very Chanel, no?” For the next collection, ‘It’s All About Luxury”, Lagerfeld coaxed one of Chanel’s tailors out of retirement to find out how she made the sleeves of her iconic suit jacket. “They were cut in five different places” he told Women’s Wear Daily and thus pre- sented a collection of fifty suits in myriad colours and countless var- iations of cut, in luxurious materials of panne velvet with subtle beading and opulent embroidery inspired by Coco Chanel’s personal collection of Baroque objects and elaborate patterns of 18 th century furniture. Spring/Summer 1991 Ready-to-Wear © firstVIEW Spring/Summer 1992 Haute Couture © firstVIEW Autumn/Winter 1991–1992 Ready-to-Wear © firstVIEW