A PRESTIGE HONG KONG WORLD EXCLUSIVE
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF KARL LAGERFELD
by Stephen Short

How many did you see before casting her?
I know her. I saw nobody, hmm?

Do you always know with whom you’ll work?
You know, I do look at magazines, I look at photographs people send me, but I never do casting myself, only final casting, perhaps. I tend to like to use the same girls. I hate too many changes in that respect. Except with male models, because I’m not crazy about the attitude of male models. If one is okay, you keep them. I think Claudia Schiffer is better than ever. There are few very, very great girls. But it’s not like in the ’90s, the days of Linda Evangelista. That’s démodé now, that’s another era. Very tacky, hmm? On the one hand there was something intellectual going on during that time. On the other, it was just tacky. But you know, decades have a look, a mood, but that was that. We know what the ’90s looked like now, but during the ’90s we thought it was great perhaps.

I have to ask again. How much did you feel you had to create your own iconography in leading a house like Chanel, which already had so much of its own?
This is the kind of question I don’t answer because I’m not pretentious enough for that. Not because I think it would be not decent to answer such a question, but I have no idea. This is the type of question I would ask you and you tell me. It’s not up to me to tell you.

Well, I’m being pretentious enough to tell you that’s my opinion, right or wrong.
It’s better to be wrong than have no feeling at all. What can I say? I don’t change, I have a voice. Modernising is not modernising. I can’t give you a lesson. It’s much simpler than that. You see it and you understand it. It’s not up to me to lecture you. When I started with Chanel, we did four collections per year. Now we do eight. Pre-fall, fall, couture, pre-spring, spring/summer, and then cruise and so on. But I don’t count. I like fashion as a non-stop life. I’ve never done anything else in my life and I don’t want to do something else, no. I’m not a frustrated writer or architect, I’m frustrated by nothing at all, and frustration is the mother of all crimes. I wanted to be in fashion and I’m in fashion.

You’re not just in fashion, you are fashion. But doesn’t the quest for perfection frustrate you?
No. There is always disappointment in the work. But I always have the feeling there is a glass border I cannot cross. Ambition? I have no ambition. I just want things in a certain way. So it’s easy and pleasant for me. If one day I cross this glass border, then somehow I feel it will be over, so I’d better forget about that. I like what I do, but I always say to myself, I could do it better. This is a very strange business where one shouldn’t talk too much, even if you’re good with words.

Which you are.
This I know, hmm?

You’d be superb on your own television show. Has anyone ever asked you to do that?
I do get asked on shows. But I wouldn’t want to do that all the time. I suffer already from over-exposure . . . exactly, hmm?

What was the last book you read?
I was mad for a Picasso book. And what I’m reading now I hardly dare tell you, as you’ll say I’m really too pretentious a person. A book about the philosopher, Simone Veil, I don’t know if you know?

She’s a Jewish lawyer and politician whose family died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yes. It’s about her approach to religion and mythology. Very limited but it’s very, very interesting. But I don’t want to talk about this because I don’t want this kind of image.

What else have you read recently?
I read 10 books at the same time. It’s hard to say. I’d have to make an inventory. I read some French and a lot in English. I don’t read French modern literature, I can read classical, but not modern. I do read newspapers, but very quickly. I want to be informed, I want to read everything, I want to see everything, I have no need to be part of it. But I’m a voyeur, you see? An intellectual voyeur.