Fashionable Kaiser: habits and weaknesses of Karl Lagerfeld. Karl Lagerfeld - biography and personal life He used to wear long flowing hair
The great fashion designer of our time, Karl Lagerfeld, began his career at the then famous fashion house of Pierre Balmain. Thanks to his skills, he created sketches for brands such as Chloe, Fendi and Chanel (he has been managing the house of this brand since 1983), and only in his fifth decade he founded his own clothing line. It would not be an exaggeration to say that with his death an entire era in the fashion world passed away.Childhood and family of Karl Lagerfeld
The future outstanding fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was born on September 10, 1933 in Hamburg, Germany. For many years, the man liked to mislead correspondents, all the time changing his date of birth to 1933. This is due to the fact that his mother made a mistake in the documents, which she informed her son about only before her death. 
Karl was born into a successful family of a wealthy businessman. At that time, my mother was 42, and my father was 60. This was not their first marriage; Karl has two half-sisters. Initially, his last name sounded like Lagerfeldt, and in the early 60s he removed the last letter to make it sound more euphonious.
While still a child, Lagerfeld spent most of his free time studying languages. He inherited his passion for them from his father, who could boast of perfect pronunciation in 12 different languages. As for Karl, he “only” mastered English, German, French and Italian.
It is also worth noting the young man’s passion for luxury things, which his mother instilled in him. At the age of 6, he did not run around in shorts and T-shirts, but wore exclusively shirts with cufflinks and even knew how to tie his own ties.
One day, when the boy was improving his piano skills, his mother burst into the room and slammed the piano shut, declaring: “You better devote your time to drawing, at least it doesn’t make so much unnecessary noise.” He really began to draw and soon began to dream about the path of an artist, but then he realized that creating exclusive clothes was the true calling of a creative person.
When he turned 14, Karl asked his parents for their blessing and went to Paris. In 1952, the guy applied to the French Lyceum, where he studied fashion tailoring. During his studies, he also met Yves Saint Laurent, who in the future became a good, loyal friend and companion.
At first, Karl studied diligently, and three years later he went to a competition where Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain and other famous designers sat on the jury. He submitted an amazing coat design and won first prize in this category. After these events, the young man’s life changed dramatically, because Pierre Balman himself offered him a job. For 3 years, Karl worked hard, coming up with sketches and honing his skills at the Balman fashion house.
Design career of Karl Lagerfeld
Having gained good experience at the Ballian fashion house, in 1958 Karl became the art director of the Jean Patou company, although his first collection was received coolly, since the dresses were quite revealing for that time. After 5 years, the man unexpectedly decided to move to Rome to better study art history. 
A few months later, he could boast of lucrative contracts with four famous fashion houses - Fendi, Chloe, Charles Jourdan, Krizia. It is noteworthy that Lagerfeld always tried to make his contribution. For example, it was he who introduced unique camisoles and attractive translucent items into Chloe.
In 1963, Karl signed a contract with Fendi. Thanks to his efforts and imagination, many famous models learned about this brand, including Catherine Deneuve, Grace Jones and Gina Lollobrigida. He expanded the line of clothing produced and was able to add lightness to the brand’s fur products.
In 1971, the fashion designer became creative director of the Chanel fashion house. After Coco Chanel died, many famous personalities tried to take over the powerful corporation, but due to a number of failures, they abandoned this idea. It was Karl who managed to return the brand to its greatness and originality. Princess Diana often wore Chanel outfits.
In 1975, Lagerfeld decided to expand his horizons and tried to create perfume. Like everything the guru undertakes, he managed it with ease. The aroma turned out to be delicate, floral, and most importantly, it completely enveloped the lovely clothes of the fair half of humanity.
In 1990, the man released a new fashion collection of clothes, which was presented by Claudia Schiffer herself. After 2 years, he again became the director of the Chloe brand, but he never managed to stay in his post. In 1997, this post was taken by Stella McCartney.
Karl Lagerfeld in Moscow
In 2000, the fashion designer delighted millions of his fans with a new brand called Lagerfeld Gallery. Some time later in the same year, the debut show at Paris Fashion Week took place.
In 2002, the fashion designer worked on unique outfits for the Madonna and Kylie Minogue show. In 2004, he sold the rights to his clothing line to Tommy Hilfiger, but retained the right to create exclusive items. Two years later, Lagerfeld created another brand - K by Karl Lagerfeld, and in 2010 he was honored and awarded the Legion of Honor for his incredibly huge contribution to the development of art.
In 2015, the man presented a new collection of clothes in the luxurious Parisian casino Grand Palais. In the middle of the year, he released a short film about the unrivaled Coco Chanel. The main character was played by Keira Knightley. In April, the girl took part in an advertising campaign for the Chanel brand. The image turned out to be feminine and incredibly sensual. In the summer, Karl presented a new collection of engagement rings, which he created together with the jewelry company Frederick Goldman.
Karl Lagerfeld Collection for Chanel Spring/Summer 2016
Karl Lagerfeld's millions of fans know him as a talented fashion designer, but he also had other more worldly interests. For example, he created perfumes, painted, photographed and even wrote books. Despite his busy schedule, he always found time to have a nice chat with his girlfriends and take a couple of high-quality photos. Absolutely all the world's models adored him, because when he held a camera in his hands, girls, through the prism of his lens, became objects of adoration and desire, and the photographs won the hearts of all lovers of high fashion.
Personal life of Karl Lagerfeld
The only true love of the outstanding fashion designer was the socialite Jacques de Bascher. The young people met in 1971 and were a couple until 1983. After this, the man left for another prominent fashion designer, Yves-Saint Laurent, which led to a break between the two eminent designers. According to Karl, their relationship was purely platonic - there was no intimacy in it. But in his relationship with Yves-Saint, Jacques was not such a puritan. In 1989 he died of AIDS. 
After this, Lagerfeld’s heart closed to close relationships. Having survived the shock, Karl settled in a huge mansion. The only creature that the fashion designer doted on was his cat Choupette (translated from French as “cabbage”) of the Burmese breed. A familiar fashion model gave her to Karl for foster care, but the pet never returned to her former owner - the fashion designer could not part with her. The kitten got his own personal chef, stylist and servant, Choupette ate from silver dishes and... brought the owner a lot of money. Choupette earned more than 3 million euros from advertising campaigns for the Opel and Shu Uemura brands alone. And that’s not counting her plush copies and the book “Choupette: The Personal Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat.”
Death
On February 18, 2019, Karl Lagerfeld was urgently hospitalized. For the previous few weeks, the 85-year-old fashion designer, who was suffering from incurable pancreatic cancer, had been complaining of feeling unwell. On the morning of February 19, the icon of modern fashion passed away. 
Today, September 10, the famous designer, Kaiser of the fashion world, photographer and creative director of the House of Chanel celebrates his birthday. On this occasion, we invite you to recall important, interesting, unusual and little-known facts from the biography of the famous fashion designer.
Perhaps it’s worth starting with the fact that the exact date of birth of Karl Lagerfeld is unknown: most sources call 1933, others indicate 1935, and the Kaiser himself calls the year of his birth 1938.
Known for his brash and peremptory statements, Karl Lagerfeld had a tough temper even at an early age: by his own admission, on his fourth birthday he asked his mother for a personal servant. By the way, today the Kaiser has a housekeeper, a cook and a driver at his disposal 24 hours a day.
Karl Otto Lagerfeld removed the last letter from the original name (Lagerfeldt) to make it more commercially attractive.
By the way, at the beginning of his career, Lagerfeld worked under the pseudonym Roland Karl - it was under this name that he released his first collection for the House of Jean Patou, which failed miserably.
Karl Lagerfeld has hundreds of iPods. In an interview, the fashion designer explained his passion for Apple products:
The iPod is brilliant. I have 300 of them.
But Lagerfeld does not favor telephones (and, first of all, telephone conversations), preferring to communicate through letters and faxes.
Lagerfeld is a famous book lover. As the designer himself admitted, there are many more books in his house than bookshelves, and the library itself contains more than 300 thousand volumes.
In 2000, he founded his own publishing house, 7L, and then opened a bookstore in Paris under the same name.
What is the most important thing in the house of a famous fashion designer? Desktop? Closet? It turns out to be a trash can. It includes all the sketches, sketches, photographs, old clothes, accessories and other failed “legacy” of the Kaiser - in his own words, he throws out absolutely everything:
I have to do something new, and not remember the old!
Lagerfeld's voice can be heard in a popular computer game GTA IV, where he plays the role of the host of a "local" radio station. As the designer himself stated, he is not a fan of video games, but was glad to become a part of it. He was especially attracted by the opportunity to have “politically incorrect conversations.”
In 2010, for the German safe manufacturer Döttling, Karl Lagerfeld created the most expensive safe in the world at that time. The mirrored Narcicuss by the famous designer was produced in a quantity of only 30 pieces and cost 336 thousand dollars.
A year later, Lagerfeld created a personalized collection of pens for the French brand, which, of course, was also released in limited edition.
To create sketches, Karl prefers to use not ordinary pencils and paints, but products of the Japanese beauty brand Shu Uemura, with which the fashion designer collaborates. For example, in the drawings of future clothing models you can often find nail polishes, the palette for which was chosen by the Kaiser himself.
In 2011, Karl “adopted” a small Siamese kitten, whom he named Choupette. The childless designer's favorite has two of her own governesses, a personalized bag, and several photo shoots in famous glossy magazines.
Source LDN Fashion
Source Thought Catalog
Photo Gettyimages.com/Fotobank.com
Photo by Harper's Bazaar US
“I drink it immediately after waking up and before going to bed. I can drink it at night and go to sleep. I don’t drink coffee, I don’t drink tea, I only drink Diet Coke,” the designer says in an interview. According to rumors, Karl Lagerfeld has a specially hired person who carries a silver tray with a treasured bottle behind him at public events.
He wanted to become a cartoonist
But working with clothes brought Lagerfeld more money.
Nicole Kidman and Karl Lagerfeld, 2005
Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent - two of the greatest designers of the era - quarreled forever
The reason was Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld's partner and assistant. When Lagerfeld introduced Saint Laurent to his assistant in the early 1970s, the designer instantly fell in love with him. Jealousy led to the fact that the fashion designers never communicated again.
The designer does not drink or smoke
“I don’t have time for alcohol,” is how the designer describes his attitude towards alcoholic beverages. Lagerfeld also abstains from cigarettes: they, according to him, only keep his hands busy when he needs to sketch something.
He used to wear his hair long and flowing
In 1976, tired of the vagaries of tangled hair, Lagerfeld came up with an image with a pigtail and has not changed it to this day. He doesn't like combs or styling products. His maximum is Klorane dry shampoo.
Nicole Kidman and Ines de la Fressange, 1990
The designer began his career at Balmain
In 1955 he worked as an assistant to Pierre Balmain. Three years later, Lagerfeld was invited to the position of art director of the Fashion House of Jean Patou. Since 1963, he began working simultaneously on four brands of different styles - Chloe, Krizia, Charles Jourdan and Fendi. Lagerfeld joined Chanel in 1983.
His cat Choupette gets paid
Lagerfeld reads Thomas Mann and Joan Didion
His favorite books are the collection of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the novel “Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann and “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion. He calls his bible “The Sense of Beauty” by Santayana George. You can view a complete guide to the designer's library.
He reads in bed
“I don’t like coffee tables and large-format books. Books are not tombstones on a table. They should open easily and be comfortable for reading in bed.”
Karl Lagerfeld has Paris's highest award
Despite the designer's German origin, the leadership of the French capital named Lagerfeld an honorary citizen of Paris. In the spring of 2017, the mayor of the city, Anne Hidalgo, presented him with the Grand Vermeil medal, the highest award in Paris, for his contribution to the cultural image of the city.
When was Karl Lagerfeld born? Although the birth register records that Karl Lagerfeld was born on September 10, 1933, the couturier himself claims that the date of his birth is somewhere between 1933 and 1938. He once even promised to post documents that no one knows about, confirming his words. As Lagerfeld himself said, “everything was not what everyone thought.”
When he was 14 years old, his family moved from Hamburg to Paris, where the boy studied at the high fashion school at the same time as I. Saint Laurent. In 1954, the International Wool Secretariat organized a competition in which Karl Lagerfeld, as a 21-year-old (16-year-old) young man, received his first prize for a coat sketch and was invited to work at the Pierre Balmain House, where he worked for 4 years. .
Star Trek
After the Balmain Fashion House, Lagerfeld was invited to the position of art director at Jean Patou, where he did not stay for more than 4 years.
Disillusioned with high fashion, Karl Lagerfeld left Paris for Italy to study art history. Then, becoming an independent designer, he designed completely different collections for such fashion houses as Chloe, Krizia, Charles Laurdan and Fendi.
In 1974, he launched his own line of men's clothing, Karl Lagerfeld Impression, and received an invitation to teach at the Vienna Higher School of Applied Arts (Hochschule fur angewalte Kunst) as a professor.
In 1980, it was Karl Lagerfeld who introduced the fashion for miniskirts, and then for short skirts. But real popularity came to him three years later, when the owners of Chanel invited him to become an art director, and then Lagerfeld became the creator of haute couture and ready-to-wear lines. At the same time, he created his own lines - KL and KL by Karl Lagerfeld.
While still in the position of art director of the Chanel Fashion House, Lagerfeld was able not only to change their image, but also to attract new clients, make the Chanel style more modern and, together with C. Lacroix, regained the lost influence of high fashion. In the 80s, the Chanel brand was counterfeited more than any other brand in the history of fashion. For his haute couture collection for Chanel in 1986, Lagerfeld received the Golden Thimble. By the end of the 90s, it was believed that his style had become much closer to the style of Chanel herself, be it suits or romantic evening dresses in the Belle Epoque style.
In addition to creating fashionable clothes, Lagerfeld is also interested in photography and publishes several books of his own photographs. He received the Lucky Strike Designer Award for them, and in 1993 the prize of the German Society of Photography (Deutsche Geselleschaft fur Fotographie). It is not surprising that after such success the Karl Lagerfeld Gallery was opened in Paris.
With the same success, there was an art gallery called Lagerfeld Gallery - Studio 7L, where more than ten collections were born a year. According to Lagerfeld himself, he slept no more than four hours a day.
In the spring of 2000, it opened its own publishing house called 7L, which published a photo album dedicated to the works of makeup artist Stephane Marais, a book about the poet Alan Seeger, who died during the First World War, and the legendary French actress of the turn of the century Gabrielle Reju.
Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is called the emperor of modern fashion with unlimited performance at 78 years old. After all, for the last 25 years he has been the creative director of Chanel; in addition, he dresses Hollywood stars, designs costumes for theater and cinema, and also does professional photography. There are rumors that this is not all the designer can do: Deutsche Welle claims that the designer is currently designing 80 villas in Dubai.
Karl Lagerfeld - personal life
Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld practically does not talk about his personal life and carefully protects it. Some argue that he is gay, because after his best friend Jacques de Bascher died 15 years ago, Karl no longer maintains close relationships with anyone. Others claim that he is crazy about women, because he creates precisely for them, and it was Lagerfeld who revealed to the world
