Andrew Bolton, Amanda Harlech, and Sébastien Jondeau Remember Karl Lagerfeld’s Life and Legacy

[soft classical music]

This year's exhibition is called Karl Lagerfeld:

A Line of Beauty, and it's a celebration

of Karl's extraordinary career.

His career spanned 65 years.

Karl would often say he was four people.

That he was one person at Chanel, one person at Fendi,

one person at his own label, and one person at Chloe.

And to an extent, that's true.

Fendi, you know, it was more of his modernist tendencies.

Chloe, he's more romantic.

At Karl Lagerfeld, he's more minimalist,

and I suppose at Chanel, more of his historicist

and post-modernist sensibilities.

So to an extent, you know, that was true,

but I think that themes transcended all of those houses.

What was remarkable about Karl was that he was able

to navigate all these different houses,

sometimes simultaneously, to create relatively

distinct aesthetics with those particular brands.

So he was the ultimate chameleon.

We met at one of his parties that he would throw

in his sort of 18th century house in Paris.

He would throw these enormous fashion parties

and the great and good and everybody and the bad

all came, and it was fantastic, and I met him there.

And then I went on meeting him, and in '96,

I started working at Chanel.

The very first time I met Karl was in 2004, actually.

He was extraordinary.

I think what struck me the most was obviously

his intelligence and his knowledge,

but also how confident he was.

When I first met Karl, I was doing a student job

and I was 15 years old, and I didn't know who he was at all.

Yeah, my role at the beginning with Karl was only, like,

to be like a bodyguard, but with the time,

he became more like...

Of course, I was his private secretary, I would say,

than his personnel assistant.

I think actually working and being a friend of Karl,

there wasn't really a difference.

Karl loved his work.

That was his life.

He gave everything to work and that was his happy place,

and there was no division and no holidays.

He made working the most glorious,

inspiring, revelatory time.

[ethereal music]

I guess we have these three here,

which will keep everything in place.

So one thing that I noticed with Karl's work

is that across the different brands,

across the different time periods,

there was a fairly strong shoulder.

There was also a really kind of angular line

along the tailored jackets from the shoulder

into the kind of chest area.

And the finishes, it's been a treat to see everything

on the inside, something that many people don't get to see.

We wanted to focus more on Karl the designer,

so less his words and more his works.

And we honed in on his creative process,

particularly his sketching.

The drawing was sort of a mix between a technical drawing

and an expressionistic fashion illustration.

[thoughtful music]

For me, you know, Carl was like a genius.

He was drawing like crazy, you know, like a machine.

He can start to make like 20 dresses

in like two, three hours, you know?

He always said he was part of the working class,

meaning that he worked all day and all night,

and I didn't know how he achieved what he did.

It was just extraordinary.

So that was the biggest challenge,

was trying to do him justice, do a man of such

extraordinary productivity justice.

Karl didn't have hobbies.

The thing he loved most of all was to work,

and that meant to sketch and to fit.

The sketches were almost like love letters.

They had this secret language, this private language

that only the premiers could decipher

and then translate and decode into a garment.

So it's so nice to have Karl's very first design represented

in the exhibition, just as a toile, but nevertheless,

it's very accurate rendition of what his first design was,

so I think that's also very moving.

And at the time, we also found a letter that Karl wrote

to his mother, just after he won the Woolmark prize.

He left the prize, came back home on his own,

had supper at eight o'clock and wrote this eight-page letter

to his mother that was really moving and talking about

his experience and the joy and the pride that he had

winning the prize.

But you also hear his personality and his humor and his wit

that became so much associated with Karl.

Well, I wish I was there with Karl and his mother looking

at the River Elba in Hamburg when she said to him,

you know, there is the gateway to other worlds, I mean...

You should go.

And I think Karl always, you know,

from the very moment he saw that 18th century painting

with Frederick and Voltaire, literally as a child,

which he kept all his life,

he had a yearning to be in Paris.

I will say, like, it's my village.

The 7th near to the Eglise Saint-Germain

is the place that I was the most during my 20 years,

'cause we were doing so many things in like,

a circle of like two kilometers, one kilometers, I will say.

Well, Karl really loved...

I mean, he loved Paris, and he loved Paris in June,

'cause he said the air was like silk,

and he used to love just strolling flanerie through Paris,

through Saint-Germain.

But his favorite place that he would always gravitate to

would be the Cafe Flore.

Let's go to the Flore.

We were like coming here, like, not every day,

but like four, five days a week.

Karl was coming here since the '60s.

[upbeat music]

And there's one particular silhouette

that he would return to again and again and again

which we call the Schlemmerian silhouette, which is based

after Oskar Schlemmer, the bauhaus artist,

which was a very, very broad shoulder, a nipped-in waist,

and wider hips, and it's something you see

across all of the different design houses,

and I think that the areas of the body

that he was obsessed with, with the shoulders,

and also the just the top of the ribcage.

He always wanted to make it as narrow as possible.

And I think that was partly to do with youthfulness.

I think he felt that having this very narrow ribcage

gave an sort of sense of youthfulness.

[smooth music]

It's the...

One of the wedding dresses selected for the exhibition.

And I just wanna check that we have

the new underskirt prepared.

I don't know if Karl intended to create

a sort of cipher of himself.

I mean, he often was delighted at this cartoon of himself,

or this dolly that he had constructed

by virtue of what he wore and his powdered white hair

in the ponytail, the dark glasses.

[crowd chattering]

[energetic music]

Karl became this sort of icon,

he became a sort of rockstar, and he developed

this sort of look that he called the dolly, or the puppet,

and that ossified it around the early 2000s,

which was, you know, the black and white uniform

that he created with the high collar and the cravat

and the chrome hearts jewelry, and I think people very much

sort of see that side of Karl and they think, that's Karl.

And for me, that was just a sort of disguise.

It was a way of allowing him, in a way,

to pass incognito on the world stage.

So these dualities that I think have share the sort

of contradictory sides of Karl.

Masculine, feminine, romantic, military,

historical, futuristic.

So I hope that when people walk through the exhibition

and they see these dualities and these contradictions,

they get a better sense of Karl, who he really was,

as opposed to the image and the myth of Karl.

But I think Karl was extraordinary, you know?

He was three things.

He was a total designer, so he, you know, made furs,

he made dresses, he made suits, he made handbags,

he made shoes, he did makeup.

He was somebody who did interiors and photography,

he wrote books, he directed plays.

But I think ultimately, you know,

what Karl's legacy will be is this sort of fashion designer

impresario who was able to marriage art and business,

which has really become the sort of model

for contemporary fashion.

And he always wanted to be relevant,

and he never wanted to look back.

I think he did look back.

I think he was actually deeply nostalgic,

and I think he looked back, but he would never admit it.

I think that what also what kept him so relevant

was his curiosity, his intelligence,

but also his sort of open-mindedness.

He would take inspiration from anywhere,

from a green sweater in the street or, you know,

from art or from film or from literature.

So he didn't have any, he wasn't a snob.

Well, he was a snob.

He was a democratic snob.

What made Karl unique was his enormous knowledge

and his joy in absolutely dancing with every historical

and cultural reference, making extraordinary

and original and unique combinations.

I think it was such a radical transformation

of the classic Chanel suits with the miniskirt,

and Chanel always hated knees, didn't she?

[melancholic music]

This year we were fortunate to work with Tadao Ando,

the architect who designed the exhibition.

Tadao and Karl were great friends, had a lot of respect

and admiration for each other, and Tadao actually designed

a house for Karl that never got built.

So I think it's just so poetic that he can now live

in a house that Tadao built.

[melancholic music continues]