Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld dead

Superstar designer Karl Lagerfeld has died at the age of 85, his fashion label Chanel confirmed on Tuesday.
The announcement came just weeks after the man known as the "Kaiser" in the industry did not appear at shows during Paris Haute Couture week for Chanel, which he has led since 1983.

Karl Lagerfeld, fashion's quick-witted king
They called him the "Kaiser", and for decades Karl Lagerfeld reigned imperially over the fashion world.
From his perch at Chanel, the German-born designer presided over the most famous of all fashion houses like the 18th-century absolute monarchs he modelled himself on.
With his powdered white pony tail, black sunglasses, and starched high-collared white shirts, he was as instantly recognisable as his celebrity clients.

While other designers came to be associated with a particular look, Lagerfeld's greatest invention was "Karl".
He put himself at the heart not just of his own label, but also of Chanel and Fendi -- the Italian house he headed for more than half a century.
Such staggering stamina and longevity in a world as ephemeral as fashion, where talents regularly crash and burn, added to the mystery this steely survivor loved to wrap himself in.

His waspish wit -- "Anyone who wears jogging pants has lost control of their life" -- added another layer of fascination and ensured he hogged the headlines even when his clothes did not.
A renovator rather than a revolutionary, his genius was for subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, updating classic luxury labels with street style influences.
His streetwise smarts sent Chanel sales surging to $10 billion in 2017 even as Lagerfeld entered the second half of his eighties.
"Karl doesn't so much design as reign," one fashion insider remarked.
Lagerfeld was never in any doubt that he was born to lead, confessing he had asked his Prussian mother for a valet for his fifth birthday.
His origins, however, were not quite as aristocratic as he may have liked.

Rivalry with Saint Laurent
His father ran an evaporated milk company in the northern port city of Hamburg, and although the family were comfortable, he was far from the precocious artist prince of later lore who lived in a castle with a retinue of servants.
Like his age, from which he shaved up to five years at times, much about the Lagerfeld legend is hazy.
In 1952, his mother packed him off to Paris to complete his education, saying he could do whatever he wanted as long as he did not become a priest or a dancer.

Two years later he shared the prestigious Woolmark design prize with Yves Saint Laurent.

It was the beginning of a friendship that would later turn to romantic and professional rivalry, with Lagerfeld once dismissing the great designer as "very provincial, very middle-of-the-road French, very pied-noir".
From the start, the fast-talking, lisping Lagerfeld honed his reputation as a brilliant provocateur who could play to the gallery in four languages.
He designed the shortest skirts ever seen on the Paris catwalk in 1962 for Jean Patou and later, during the hippie years, sent a model out wearing nothing but a feather in her pubic hair.
Having pushed Fendi into the big league, he was brought in to save Chanel in 1983 when only its celebrated range of perfumes was making money.
And revive it he did.

He took its trademark quilted handbags, tweeds, and cardigan jackets and exaggerated them into something more gaudy and refined at the same time, while still true to the spirit of the brand's founder Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel.
Along the way, Lagerfeld helped create the "supermodel", elevating the likes of Ines de la Fressange, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, and Stella Tennant into household names.
He even helped popularise the yellow hi-vis vest by posing in one for an official French safety campaign -- "It's ugly, it goes with nothing, but it could save your life" -- only for it to become the uniform of recent anti-government protests.

'Cultural bulimic'
But as fast as he made money, Lagerfeld spent it, throwing millions "out of the window", as he described it, for art, furniture, and homes in which to display his treasures.
He once described himself as a "cultural bulimic".
Despite being at the centre of fashion's social whirl, Lagerfeld was always a solitary figure. His only long-standing relationship was with the philandering French aristocrat Jacques de Bascher, who cheated on him with Saint Laurent.
"Karl's multilingual loquacity and his constant sociability belie a solitary nature and a visceral isolation from others," his biographer Alicia Drake wrote.

After de Bascher died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, Lagerfeld, who said repeatedly that "I have no human feelings", piled on the pounds and lavished gifts on several young men with whom he became infatuated, she said.
But he later lost all the weight and more -- 92 pounds (42 kilos), he said -- so he could "squeeze into Hedi Slimane's suits", and wrote a bestselling diet book.
As the years went by, Lagerfeld assembled his own alternative jet-set "family" comprised of his male and female muses including US model Brad Kroenig, whose son Hudson -- Lagerfeld's godson -- became a fixture of the Chanel catwalk.

"I have a sister in America who I haven't seen for 40 years. Her children never even send me a Christmas card," Lagerfeld complained.
Despite the company of his fashion family and the small coterie of male models known as "Karl's Boys" who often accompanied him, Drake argued that Lagerfeld "is alone in a crowd. At the centre of this solitary soul is a denial of intimacy," she added.
It was an insight that Lagerfeld himself seemed to confirm when he said, "I live in a set, with the curtains of the stage closed with no audience.
"I am like a caricature of myself. It is like a mask. For me the Venice carnival lasts all year long."
"I have nothing to say," the designer declared in December 2018, scotching rumours he was writing his memoirs.
"I'm actually trying to make sure that I won't be remembered."

The wit and wisdom of Karl Lagerfeld: his best quotes

Designer Karl Lagerfeld was not just fashion's great survivor, he was also one of its most wicked wits.
Here are some of his most famous lines:
On himself
"I am very much down to earth. Just not this earth."

On pyjamas
"Everybody should go to bed dressed like they have a date at the door."
On fashion show 'highs'
"I'm a kind of fashion nymphomaniac who never gets an orgasm."
On intellectuals
"I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion."
On selfies
"Electronic masturbation."
On his sunglasses
"They are my burka... I'm a little shortsighted, and people, when they're shortsighted, they remove their glasses and then they look like cute little dogs who want to be adopted."
On vanity
"Vanity is the healthiest thing in life."
On learning languages
"Anyone who is not at least trilingual is a hick."
On Andy Warhol
"I shouldn't say this, but physically he was quite repulsive."
On short men
"I have a terrible loathing of ugly short men... women can be short but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will never forgive in life... they are mean and they want to kill you."
On Chanel
"What I do Coco would have hated. The label has an image and it's up to me to update it. I do what she never did. I had to go from what Chanel was to what it should be, could be, what it had been to something else."
On his secret
"I am a sort of vampire, taking the blood of other people."
On children
"Having adult children makes you look 100 years old. I don't want that."
On love
"The only love I really believe in is a mother's love for her children."
On the oldest profession
"I'm rather pro-prostitution. I admire people who do it. It can't be much fun. Thank goodness for it. People need relief or they become murderers. Frustration is the mother of crime, and so there would be much more crime without prostitutes and without porn movies."
On the aesthetically challenged
"I hate ugly people. They are very depressing."
On Russian men
"If I was a Russian woman I would be lesbian. Russian men are not good looking."
On retirement
"Why should I stop working? If I do I'll die and it'll all be finished."
On homosexuality
"When I asked my mother what homosexuality was, she said it was the colour of your hair, and she was right. It is nothing."
On gloves
"When I was 14, I wanted to smoke because I wanted to look grown-up. But my mother said: 'You shouldn't smoke. Your hands are not that beautiful and that shows when you smoke.'"
On hats
"My mother used to say, 'You shouldn't wear hats. You look like an old dyke.' Do you say such things to children? She was quite funny, no?"
On sports clothing
"Whoever wears running pants has lost control over his life."
On being a legend
"A sense of humour and a little lack of respect: that's what you need to make a legend survive."
On overworking
"We cannot talk about suffering. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta."
On mobile phones
"I send notes. I'm not a chambermaid whom you can ring at every moment. Today, you know, most people act like they work at a switchboard in a hotel."
On creating
"I have a sort of Alzheimer's for my own work, which I think is a very good thing. Today too many people remember what they did -- just forget it all and start again."