The news that Karl Lagerfeld had died came as a shock—a bit like hearing that the Queen of England is dead. Like many of his clients, Lagerfeld was coy about his age, though it seems that he was eighty-five, and one shouldn’t be surprised when an elderly person expires peacefully. But then Lagerfeld wasn’t, as the Queen isn’t, really a person. Each made a decision early on—Lagerfeld’s willful, Elizabeth’s imposed by tradition—to renounce being an individual. Monarchy will not be the same after Q.E. II, in part because we know too much about her successors, their ordinary faults and desires. And the realm of fashion won’t be the same after Karl I.
But Lagerfeld’s regime as a designer was more significant than his legacy will be. A supreme technician and workhorse, he didn’t change the way we dress. His sketches, like his speech, were rapid-fire, but their dazzle concealed a lack of originality. In 1983, some thirty years into Lagerfeld’s career, the owners of Chanel hired him to jazz up the brand, and he succeeded wildly, though, unlike its creator, he never reimagined womanhood. Decades earlier, Fendi had brought him on board to make fur fun again, and he did that, too, dyeing and distressing it with his singular insouciance. Lagerfeld liked to play at being a desecrator. “You have to treat an institution like a whore,” he said, referring to the decorous house that Chanel built. “Then you get something out of her.”
Well-bred aesthetes have a long history of mocking the proprieties with one hand and enforcing them with the other. Compared with the iconoclasm of Rei Kawakubo, or of Alexander McQueen, Lagerfeld’s work was old-fashioned. He prided himself on staying relevant, but I suspect that in his heart—a well-defended safe room—he revered beauty too much to despoil it by radical experiment. His real audacity was reserved for his aphorisms. “I am like a caricature of myself,” he admitted, in an atypically sincere moment. “For me, the Carnival of Venice lasts all year.” If his ready-to-wear for Chanel often felt intentionally superficial, perhaps it, too, was a form of caricature.
Just as most of us have never known an England without Elizabeth, few of us can conceive of the fashion world without Karl. They are both unique in their longevity, and neither ever allowed personal considerations—age, fatigue, grief, self-doubt, or criticism—to interfere with duty. For sixty-five years, Lagerfeld churned out collections, while pursuing parallel careers in photography and publishing. He read voraciously, and boasted of owning a library of some quarter million volumes. He also found time to write a best-selling diet book, cautioning readers that, if they didn’t care about getting skinny for the sake of fashion, they shouldn’t read it. Having virtually given up bodily nourishment, he took comfort in the bulimic acquisition of fabulous dwellings, objects, and people, nearly all of them disposable. (“The most important piece in the house,” he said, “is the garbage can.”) This great Stakhanovite was contemptuous of those peers—especially his chief rival, Yves Saint Laurent—who caved to the pressures that he seemed to thrive on. Perhaps their breakdowns aroused a sentiment—fellow-feeling—that he had ruthlessly cauterized in himself.
There was, of course, a man behind the carnival mask, who had once been the child of a terrifying mother, and the lover of a fickle Adonis, the “perfect,” “odious” Jacques de Bascher, who betrayed him with Saint Laurent, and died of AIDS, leaving Lagerfeld bereft of the desire for another intimate. Despite his professional Schadenfreude, Lagerfeld was generous to friends. He doted on a godson, and loved his cat, a creature with her own Instagram account, modelling career, full-time maid, and diamonds.
He also paid homage to Colette, a predatory feline soul who never felt the need to reconcile her contradictions—greed and discipline, reticence and flamboyance—which were Lagerfeld’s, too. It is unlikely that they met, but at the end of “The Pure and the Impure” Colette details her requisites for a friend: “They have lost their solemnity and have acquired a sane notion of what is incurable and what is curable—for instance, love.” In sum, she wrote, “they have become frivolous the hard way.” Lagerfeld, I imagine, would have passed muster.
The notion of majesty depends on the taboo against lèse-majesté: treating one’s sovereign as a familiar. But that taboo has been negated by social media. In the past decade, populism democratized fashion; styles changed by referendum, rather than by diktat. Lagerfeld’s death underscores the demise of an archaic operating system whose code was written by Louis XIV. The Sun King consolidated his power by turning his court into a hotbed of status anxiety, calibrated in degrees of chic, of which he was the arbiter. The runway shows that Lagerfeld staged for Chanel, at obscene expense, seemed drawn from Louis’s manual. Lagerfeld, too, used spectacle to reinforce his image as a divinity: trucking in an iceberg from Sweden; launching a spacecraft. He, like Louis, made an art of wowing his subjects as a way of cowing them. His passing is more than “the end of an era,” as the headlines put it. It is the end of a three-hundred-year autocracy, headquartered in France. The king is dead; long live the Web. ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment