Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld (born September 10, 1933?, Hamburg, Germany—died February 19, 2019, Paris, France) was a German fashion designer and photographer best known as the creative power behind the modern revival of Chanel, the legendary French fashion house founded by Coco Chanel in the early 20th century.

Lagerfeld moved to Paris in 1952. In 1954 he won first prize for his coat design in the French International Wool Secretariat (now the International Woolmark Prize), and in 1955 he was hired by Pierre Balmain, who put his design into production. Three years later he became artistic director of Jean Patou’s fashion house. He left Paris in 1964 to study art history in Italy. But soon he was designing freelance for a range of companies that included Chloé (whose collections he designed from 1964 to 1983 and again from 1992 to 1997), Krizia, Valentino, and shoemaker Charles Jourdan. In 1967 he was hired as consultant director by upscale Italian design house Fendi to modernize the company’s fur line. His designs proved groundbreaking. Among other innovations, he introduced the use of skins such as mole, rabbit, and squirrel—pelts never before used in high-fashion designs. He stayed with Fendi throughout his career. In 1983 Lagerfeld produced his first couture collection for Chanel, and in 1984, after a year at Chanel, he launched his own eponymous label. But it was at Chanel that Lagerfeld became truly famous. He succeeded there by consistently managing to merge the spirit of the times with Chanel’s original sartorial strategy of a “total look”—a concept that Chanel herself created—wherein individual items of clothing are less important than what they are accessorized with and how they are worn. In the 1980s, when society was fixated with money and status, Chanel made great use of the Chanel signature, double C initials. Through the 1990s, as people became more mobile, the Chanel brand fused fashion with increasing functionality.

In addition to his work for a number of fashion and design houses, Lagerfeld had myriad professional interests. He was an avid photographer. From 1987 on, he photographed many of Chanel’s fashion advertisements, and his work was published in fashion magazines such as British Vogue and Interview. Additionally, he created illustrations for an edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (1992) and created costumes for La Scala in Milan, the Florence opera house, and the Monte Carlo Ballet. His publications include The Karl Lagerfeld Diet (2004; cowritten with his physician, Jean-Claude Houdret), a manual telling of his struggle with weight loss. Also in 2004 he collaborated with the discount retailer H&M on a venture to produce limited-edition clothing lines by designers from the high-fashion world. In 2010 he collaborated with Steidl publishing house to launch the L.S.D. imprint (Lagerfeld. Steidl. Druckerei. Verlag), which published literature, biographies, and books on fashion, art, and music, most of which were translated from French and English into German. In 2015 Lagerfeld won the British Fashion Award for Outstanding Achievement, and he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: Modemethode,” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany.