Karl Lagerfeld was an intellectual. He was also prolific. He designed for Balmain, Chloé, Fendi and Chanel, he had his own namesake line, he photographed magazine editorials ( V Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue ) and shot his own campaigns. He went to work every day, and for me, that resonates.
I went to fashion school in the ’90s, which was his heyday. It was the end of a decade of excess, and Lagerfeld was putting Chanel back on the couture map. It was a dying brand when he joined it 35 years back, and it is spectacular how he updated what Coco Chanel did, constantly evolving to keep up with the present — bringing in the mini skirt, making tweeds shorter, pairing them with tights. He weathered grunge, brought athleisure into Chanel; he was one of the few people who made sportswear sexy. I agree with (editor of AmericanVogue ) Anna Wintour when she said he embraced change. He took it to the next level, but always kept it classy.
I was once invited by (late magazine editor and stylist) Isabella Blow to a Chanel fitting in Paris, in ’97-’98. It was July, so it was the couture show, but I was running late and I never made it. It is one of my deepest regrets.
PARIS, FRANCE - JANUARY 24: Lily-Rose Depp and Karl Lagerfeld walk the runway during the Chanel Spring Summer 2017 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on January 24, 2017 in Paris, France. (Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Guts and glory
Largerfeld worked with pre-established fashion houses, and had great resources. So he didn’t have to spend his time marketing the clothes or organising production, which unfortunately some of us Indian designers are still doing. So it was a fantastic marriage and probably the first of its kind, where someone came to represent the brand so powerfully, where Lagerfeld was Chanel.
His muses ranged from royalty to rock stars. While his favourites among the royals were Princess Grace of Monaco and her beautiful daughter Princess Caroline, he had a knack for identifying the next ‘it girl’ — from Claudia Schiffer and Keira Knightley to millennial muses Lily-Rose Depp and Willow Smith. He was smart; I loved the way he looked to Knightley, because she was not a classical choice for beauty. [Lagerfeld cast the actor as Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in the short film, Once Upon a Time , and said he preferred her “genius” portrayal to that of Audrey Tautou, in the 2009 Coco Before Chanel , which she played “like women’s lib”.]
The designer with model Ines De La Fressange.
Commanding presence
There is no other designer in his league who did as much, who did four lines (sometimes even eight) a year. I’ve seen documentaries where he said he woke up at 3 am to do fittings at the age of 80. He had an energy that was unbelievable. That is another inspiration, the amount he worked and educated himself.
- I’ve attended at least four to five of his shows, and his sets were spectacular. I can’t say the supermarket (Fall 2014, pictured below) and airplane (Spring 2012) sets were my favourites, but I loved the SS 2011, which I was at, where he had a French garden, but done in black and white (Lagerfeld had quipped, “It’s Versailles. It’s ‘dead French’”). For Spring 2019, he transformed the Grand Palais into Chanel By The Sea... to look at the models walking on sand, with waves lapping, was amazing. I even liked the one where he recreated his ateliers — with people working on clothes, as the models walked around. I suppose he showed the settings the clothes belonged to.
He was also one of the few people who always said what he thought. He was not called Kaiser Karl for nothing. And I have to say that, however outrageous they might have seemed at the time, I agreed with him 99.9% of the time. His line about how “people buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta” was brilliant; it really made me laugh. He just said things as they were. He didn’t mince his words even when social media surveillance came in. Being a little outrageous, I think, is OK; it goes with being a creative genius.
I think he did his best work in the last 30 years. He had command at his fingertips. I’m drawing sustenance from that. As designers, we should take cues from his discipline, fearlessness, ability to embrace change, and uncompromising stand on good taste. I see a lot of people in fashion compromise, for the sake of shock value. I think a designer’s job is to distil the essence and, at a time when people may be confused by the bombardment of information, to help them make refined choices.
Tarun Tahiliani is one of the country’s leading designers. Isabella Blow once refered to him as the Karl Lagerfeld of India.
— As told to Surya Praphulla Kumar
