Karl Lagerfeld - Designer

Vogue Mexico May 2019



Vogue Mexico Digital Edition
 
W Magazine Vol #3 2019

Channelling Chanel


Photographer: Angelo Pennetta
Stylist: Sara Moonves
Hair: Shon Hyungsun Ju
Makeup: Emi Kaneko
Manicure: Laura Forget
Cast: Ellie Bamber, Monica Belucci, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Naomi Diaz, Clémence Poésy, Elisa Sednaoui



W Magazine Digital Edition
 
Karl Lagerfeld Memorial Planned For June In Paris
Chanel and Fendi have come together to stage a memorial for Karl Lagerfeld in collaboration with the late designer’s eponymous brand. “Karl For Ever” will be staged at the Grand Palais – the iconic Paris venue that was transformed into the fantastical settings of his Chanel shows since 2005 – on the evening of June 20 during Paris Men’s Fashion Week.

Orchestrated by theatre and opera director Robert Carsen, the commemoration will comprise video footage of Lagerfeld and his collaborators on three screens, in addition to interpretative dance, music and theatre performances based on work admired by the former creative director.

“I wanted something full of life and unexpected,” Carsen told WWD of the invitation-only event, which should see some 2,500 guests in attendance. “He once famously said, ‘A funeral? I’d rather die.’”

“It will be a very powerful moment, a collective celebration of his persona,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. “The memorial will be about Karl only: who he was, what he loved, what gave him his exceptional energy. I am glad we could join forces with Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld to create together an exceptional event that measures up to him, a tribute that truly celebrates the things he loved and that inspired him.”

Since Lagerfeld died on February 19, the insurmountable loss of one of the industry’s leading creatives has been recognised in a number of ways. Chanel and Fendi, the two fashion behemoths that Lagerfeld steered towards success during his lifetime, both played David Bowie’s “Heroes” during the finale of his last autumn/winter 2019 collections. Chanel organised a minute’s silence at the start of the alpine-themed presentation, while Fendi screened a video entitled “54 years together” depicting Lagerfeld drawing a sketch of himself on his first day at the company.

The former additionally placed an illustration on each of the audience’s seats reminding them, “The beat goes on”, while the latter left small cards for guests, inscribed with Lagerfeld’s signature and the date of his passing. Both were apt acknowledgments of a designer who was famously anti-sentimental and pre-occupied with the future, rather than ever slipping into nostalgia. “Things start with me, they end with me,” Lagerfeld once told Suzy Menkes. “After that, the garbage can. I hate the idea of being heavily remembered.”

There was no public funeral after Lagerfeld died as per his own request, but a private service in Nanterre. “The greatest tribute we can pay today is to continue to follow the path he traced by – to quote Karl – ‘continuing to embrace the present and invent the future’,” Pavlovsky said about the wishes of his collaborator. Serge Brunschwig, Fendi chairman and CEO, reiterated this sense of moving forward, and declared that Lagerfeld had left the Fendi family, which he was an honorary member of, “an enormous heritage, an inexhaustible source of inspiration to continue”.
vogue.co.uk
 
A tribute during Men's week is beyond cheap.
 
A tribute during Men's week is beyond cheap.
Just clever and practical...
Most of the designers will be there. The same for the editors at least for those who will be invited.
They’ll just maybe have to flew few people.
The week after, there’s Virginie debut collection and Fendi’s retrospective Couture show.
 
^
And since it’s being curated by both Fendi and Chanel I’m sure this was the middle ground of dates they could choose from! I wish Chloe had some sort of participation in this too!
 
^^
I wonder if clothes will be included in the memorial, like a mini retrospective fashion show...
There are rumors that the next MET exhibition might be about his career.

I also wonder if there might be a sort of livestream.
2500 people and Grand Palais looks like a huge production.
 
There are rumors that the next MET exhibition might be about his career.

To be fair, he left a really extensive archive for three major brands that are still power players today so an exhibition would make total sense. I'm just wondering whether it would happen this soon.
 
To be fair, he left a really extensive archive for three major brands that are still power players today so an exhibition would make total sense. I'm just wondering whether it would happen this soon.
McQueen and Versace exhibitions were presented the year following their death.
I wonder if Max Mara, Balmain, Patou, Krizia and stuff have kept some archives.
 
Remembering Karl Lagerfeld

By Guy Trebay
June 21, 2019

PARIS — Like many complex and forceful people Karl Lagerfeld — the German-born and Paris-based designer who, until his death in February, had been creative director of Chanel since 1983 and Fendi since 1965 — was one person to the wide world and another to his friends.

Concealed behind the armor Mr. Lagerfeld wore in public — dark glasses, tight black jeans, ponytail whitened with imported Japanese powder, fingers barnacled with Chrome Hearts rings — was a man who in reality spent many of his adult years living with his mother and later (and more publicly, until his death at 85) with his Birman cat, the feline Instagram star Choupette.

“Karl liked the recognition,” Amanda Harlech, a British aristocrat who was the designer’s creative helpmate for decades, said on Thursday before a memorial sponsored by Chanel, Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld, the brand. More than 2,500 invited guests assembled on a gusty summer evening inside the monumental cast-iron and glass cathedral that is the Grand Palais, natural light still filtering in well into the night on the cusp of the solstice. “Karl would say, ‘The whole world recognizes me, but they don’t know me at all’,” Ms. Harlech said.

A layered personality who claimed to have “a Google brain” and to ignore the past was evoked during a tapestried tribute featuring video testimonials and clips from throughout his long life and readings from favorite authors like Stéphane Mallarmé, Colette and Edith Sitwell performed by Tilda Swinton, Fanny Ardant and Helen Mirren. There also were performances by Lil Buck, the star of a Memphis dance style called jookin; Pharrell Williams; the concert pianist Lang Lang, who played Chopin; the violinist Charlie Siem; and a troupe of 17 tango dancers from Argentina. “Karl loved music and he loved to dance,” Ms. Harlech said. Among his favorite entertainments, she added, was driving late at night along the corniche in St.-Tropez with the top down on his convertible Rolls-Royce. “He’d stand on the seat with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ playing full blast,” she said.

A polyglot designer, photographer, director, publisher and proprietor of a Left Bank bookshop that fueled his bibliophile addiction, Mr. Lagerfeld hurtled through life collecting furniture, houses, experiences and people and operating according to one simple precept: Never look back.

“He saw sensitivity as weakness,” Victoire de Castellane, creative director of Dior Jewelry, said.

Mr. Lagerfeld himself once expressed similar sentiments, although more flatly. “When people show me their behinds, it doesn’t bother me,” he said, using a saltier term. “When they show me their feelings, I don’t like it at all.”

Like Andy Warhol, Mr. Lagerfeld was endowed with formidable gifts, possessed of seemingly boundless energy and a steely ego. He also, like Warhol, had a distaste for his own physical form. “Karl physically hid himself — behind his work, behind his desk, behind his fan, behind his mountains of books,” said Francesca Amfitheatrof, a longtime Lagerfeld collaborator and now artistic director of the jewelry division at Louis Vuitton.

For many years, Ms. Amfitheatrof noted, Mr. Lagerfeld struggled with his weight before rigorous dieting delivered his slender body ideal. “He even hid his hands with rings,” Ms. Amfitheatrof said, adding that Mr. Lagerfeld’s mother, an accomplished violinist, famously discouraged him from following in her musical footsteps, in part because she claimed he had ugly hands.

Known as Kaiser Karl to outsiders, Mr. Lagerfeld was extravagant with those in his circle, sentimental and supportive, demanding loyalty but also returning it, friends said. “He had a family, and everybody in it had their place and their part,” said Michel Gaubert, a sound designer who for three decades created the soundtracks for Mr. Lagerfeld’s opulent Chanel shows, for which the designer plundered the corporate coffers to transform the Grand Palais into a supermarket, a cruise ship or a beach. Once, on a whim, Mr. Lagerfeld had an iceberg trucked in from Sweden to use as a backdrop for a ready-to-wear collection.

“It was a little like a court,” Mr. Gaubert added. “The king is hungry, the king wants to party, the king wants to dance.”

For some in a gathering that included Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and artistic director of Condé Nast; the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami; platoons of Chanel-clad members of the French elite; and Bernard Arnault, billionaire owner of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Mr. Lagerfeld was remembered less for his contributions to fashion across a half century at the top of the industry than for his omnivorous appetite for each new turning in the culture, a compulsion to learn about the next big literary, photographic, artistic or intellectual thing.

Speaking in rapid-fire pronouncements in the three languages in which he was fluent (German, French and English), Mr. Lagerfeld charged through life without stopping except, perhaps, to compose the personal notes for which he was famous among friends or to express a playfulness and sentimentality that the public seldom saw.

“Karl is faithful, very faithful” to friends, said Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue, who was appointed style adviser to the Karl Lagerfeld label soon after his death. “I still talk about him in the present,” Ms. Roitfeld added, “because for me he’s still here.

source | nytimes
 
This is actually such a Carine move to be the 'different' one, lol.


Carine Roitfeld tribute:


I remember my first dinner with Karl. I was nervous, knowing I was about to spend one-on-one time with the great Karl Lagerfeld, who was famous for being curious about every subject and incredibly knowledgable. My father, who was originally from Russia, spent a lot of his childhood in Berlin, and I still remember the enchanting voice of German singer Hildegard Knef, a beautiful soundtrack to my childhood. Looking for a suitable subject of conversation with Karl, I asked him if he knew of her, and off he went, telling me many details and anecdotes about this extraordinary woman. The next day, I received drawings, CDs and letters from Karl about Hildegard Knef. That’s how he was: a passionate and attentive man. He was also the only one to always send me flowers on Mother’s Day, with cards like: “You are the proof that one can be both a great stylist and an amazing mother.”

Karl was one of a kind. When I left Vogue Paris, he was the first to ask to work with me. I can still hear his voice: “Madame Roitfeld, now that you are free, we must work together.” He was the only one to call me by my last name.

Soon he started drawing and painting me, and today I treasure those gifts. The first portrait he took of me in his home marked my life for ever, as he is the one who put my hair in front of my face, creating my “look”.

Karl was one of the smartest, most inventive and innovative people I have ever known, so I took his advice to heart. He encouraged me to be original, telling me: “Everything you’re doing, you are to be the first to do.” It was a trait he valued above all else. When I wanted to start my own perfume line, he said: “OK, you want to do a perfume, now be the first one to do it. Be the first editor to make a perfume. You have to surprise people, because people are always bored.” When I was working with him, I had to surprise him – he always wanted something new. For my first issue of CR Fashion Book, the magazine cover had babies and dogs on it – he did not like that cover so much, it was not his thing. However, he still said: “I’m not sure about the picture but you surprised me and that is great.”

The greatest compliment he ever gave me was that he thought I “made people better”. I think we made each other better, and in the end, we couldn’t tell who had had which idea any more. Our book The Little Black Jacket, for example: I distinctly remember talking to Karl on the phone on a Sunday afternoon and one of us mentioned this idea, but we were never able to remember who.
Karl was my rock. He’s always been there for me, through years of friendship and creation. His sense of humour, words of advice and the precious memories of this time spent together will never leave my thoughts, and this was the same in his personal and private life. Karl had the politeness of a king, though not the punctuality. But whenever he arrived on set, he always looked everyone in the eye and thanked them, including every assistant and crew member.

He had impeccable manners and the elegance of never complaining. I am a Virgo and Karl was a Virgo too: we are very faithful people. Virgos inherently feel that everything needs to have a reason behind it, which also explains his strong work ethic.

He is always in my thoughts, so present that I still catch myself using the present tense when I talk about him today.

The Guardian
 
@Lola701 your dreams come true.
Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty
May 5 – July 16, 2023

The Costume Institute’s spring 2023 exhibition will examine the work of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019). Focusing on the designer’s stylistic vocabulary as expressed in aesthetic themes that appear time and again in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019, the show will spotlight the German-born designer’s unique working methodology. Most of the approximately 150 pieces on display will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s sketches, which underscore his complex creative process and the collaborative relationships with his premières, or head seamstresses. Lagerfeld’s fluid lines united his designs for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, creating a diverse and prolific body of work unparalleled in the history of fashion.
metmuseum.org


It sounds interesting in theory, but it probably won't be a retrospective exhibition. If they only show drawings and a finished model, it will be a rather classic exhibition. It would be interesting to show a few examples of how the design evolved from the drawing, then how the model looked on the pattern and what was changed and why and the final version.
 
You know I’ll go to the exhibition @velvetandsilk
150 pieces for such an extensive career and his various subjects of interests seems a bit limited for me ( he was a photographer and a decorator too) but I’m curious.

I think it was time for people to put back the focus on his work. I loved Karl’s clothes and sometimes I feel like there aren’t talked about enough…Even more considering that he had such a specific aesthetic.
 

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