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He may have been a monster boss,
but the late Chanel designer was a one-man stimulus package for a handful of Paris shops.
12 December 2019 (Paris, France) – When Karl Lagerfeld died this past February, “fashion and culture lost a great inspiration,” Bernard Arnault, the C.E.O. and chairman of L.V.M.H., said.
A handful of businesses in Paris also lost a major patron, a one-man stimulus package who for decades had primed their margins and their creativity. “The Lagerfeld District”: a quilted clutch of bonnes adresses along the Tuileries and the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, not far from the headquarters of Chanel, where he was the creative director.
My office is in this district but I never met him although I frequent many of the establishments noted in this piece. However I did see him present at “Le Web”, the big Paris event which is one of Europe’s longest-running tech conferences. In fact, he kicked off the 2011 program – a bit of a surprise to have a tech conference kicking off with an icon of fashion. But Karl Lagerfeld had some surprises for us. Despite being a self-proclaimed “paper freak” when it comes to books, he was a big fan of the iPad because it allowed him to work, sketch, and send these back to his studio. At the 2011 event, he put the contents of his iPad up on the screen, and it was packed full of videos and photos, for inspiration or demonstration, sketches, etc. He also showed us a short video he was concocting to advertise a handbag.
And he was a bit legendary in that he carried four different iPhones with him, with certain people only allowed to call certain phones (“It’s not one per person; I know more than four people”). And he had a bunch of iPod Nanos with the mixes of the day on them. Plus hundreds of iPods with different compilations of music he created, and he annotated them with the date so he can go back to a particular period.
The collapse of the Lagerfeld economy wasn’t catastrophic – Colette, one of his favorite boutiques, had already closed, in 2017 – but his absence continues to be felt on shop floors around the city’s central arrondissements. Over the last few months, Le Monde and the Paris editon of Vogue have done articles on that Lagerfeld economy so I thought I’d do a mash-up.
One of my favorite quotes is by Danielle Cillien Sabatier, the director of Galignani, the marvelous bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli (you can find books in Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, and other languages and its art and fashion collection has no rival) who said “Karl liked to say that he was eleven per cent of our business”. When asked if the figure was accurate, she didn’t correct it: “He was certainly our No. 1 client.”
Lagerfeld went into Galignani once or twice a week.
In a replica of his office that he once exhibited, shopping bags from the store cover every surface. “Once, we changed colors, from dark blue to light blue, and Karl said, ‘Oh, it’s the blue of Lanvin,’ ” Sabatier recalled. “I said, ‘No, it’s the blue of my eyes.’ ”
An author and publisher himself, Lagerfeld was a bibliophile of epic appetite. (Practically a bibliophage, he is said to have torn the pages out of thick paperbacks as he read them.) He bought French books, English books, books of poetry, signed books, first editions, monographs, everything he could find on the Wiener Werkstätte. “Our booksellers knew the themes of his fashion shows long before they happened,” Sabatier said. “Sometimes we were thinking, This is awkward, what is he preparing? He’d buy dozens of books on astronauts, and, months later, there’d be a rocket at the Grand Palais.”
“Karl Kaiser,” the French journalist Raphaëlle Bacqué’s biography of Lagerfeld, has been a recent best-seller at Galignani. Near the fine-arts desk, there is a little shrine to him: a framed portrait, a photograph he took of a model posing in front of the shop’s windows.
He might have been a monster boss (“I have no human feelings,” he once claimed), but he was apparently a peach of a customer. “He was very nice to everyone,” Sabatier said, pointing out another framed photograph, of Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Birman cat, Choupette, her head poking out of a Galignani bag. Lagerfeld had shot it for a window display and then given it to Sabatier for her office. She and several of her colleagues attended his memorial service. “I think it was real luck to come across such an incredible personality, and to see him in such simple conditions,” she said.
A few doors down, at Hilditch & Key, shirtmakers since 1899, Philippe Zubrzycki, the store’s manager, lit up when Lagerfeld’s name was mentioned. Monsieur Lagerfeld, he said, ordered around a hundred and fifty made-to-measure garments a year: nightshirts, kimonos, the white button-downs with collars like neck braces that had been his signature look since he lost ninety-two pounds over the course of a year by drinking protein shakes and eating nothing after 8 P.M. “He also ordered sleeveless ones, for painting,” Zubrzycki said. A client of long standing, Lagerfeld had cycled through different looks. At one point, when he was spending time at a château in Brittany, he had a taste for billowing shirts made in taffeta. “Sometimes he’d put in an order for fifty pieces and, over the weeks, the order would grow,” Zubrzycki said, acknowledging that Lagerfeld’s patronage was “fairly consequential.” Lagerfeld sent sketches for his orders by fax or courier, but he was open to suggestions from Hilditch & Key’s salespeople and tailors. “He loved when we made propositions, and often he’d say, ‘Oui, bingo!’ ”
Lagerfeld’s florist was Lachaume, a hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old family business on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where Marcel Proust went each morning to purchase an orchid for his buttonhole. Caroline Cnocquaert and Stéphanie Primet, its sister proprietors, responded immediately to a reporter’s invitation to talk about Lagerfeld, writing, “With great pleasure, he was our dream client!” The first time Lagerfeld came into the shop, in 1971, he bought “a very beautiful big white rose” from their grandmother, Giuseppina. An hour later, the sisters recalled, Yves Saint Laurent showed up, asking their mother, Colette, for exactly the same flower. When iPhones came out, Lagerfeld gave one to each sister, so that he could send them texts and images (“That was his word, rather than saying ‘photos’ ”). He hated holidays, when his ateliers were closed, and would take advantage of the fact that Lachaume stayed open, sending messages or coming in to chat. Cnocquaert and Primet had been very sad when Lagerfeld died, but, they said, “let’s think of the future, that’s what Monsieur Lagerfeld did.” They’d have their memories, they said, of his incredible orders. “We created thousands of bouquets!”