Weeks after Karl Lagerfeld’s death at 85 in February, 2019, I poured over interviews that the eternally-modern yet classic Renaissance man had given. “I only answer questions,” he had said an interview in at a WWD conference in 2013. His answers provide as inside as possible a look at l’homme extradinaire. He considered himself a fashion designer, a book publisher (regular and picture books), and a photographer, though he did much more. I’m not sure whether his books, interior designs, architecture, and photography can be considered marks of genius, but that he extended his method of fashion-design and did so well is a testament to the man’s inner-workings. His answers remind me of Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect from Wisconsin whose work so revolutionized homes from the Victorian era. Essentially, he ushered in open homes from the closed roomed Victorian houses. Lagerfeld was also innovative, taking the classic Chanel look and adding bits of modernity, such as in combining a black dress with sneakers. Both men produced homes/dresses that were inexpensive and expensive. Neither was beyond reach, yet as visionaries so far above most other people. Lagerfeld, like Wright, saw things differently than most of their respective contemporaries did. This is perhaps their shared mark of genius: not be so tied to yesterday, combined with being inspired to use creative freedom then expanding its application. This is all based in the inner constitution of the two men, which I suspect was similar. As Lagerfeld said, “I am down to earth—just not this Earth.” This is actually quite telling of genius, for such minds typically think "outside the box" and so can easily see through even societal sacred cows and thus proffer very different perspectives. The thinking, intuition and/or artistic perspective, in other words, innately go beyond the societal and individual assumptions that most people do not even realize they live by or hold. I contend that Karl Lagerfeld's artistic, or visual genius went far beyond fashion-designing.
Regarding his creativity, Lagerfeld said that perfect work conditions permit creative freedom such that fits of inspiration can run their course like a stream unimpeded by obstacles. Working for a label need not detract. “I do the job because I enjoy it,” he said. “I love to photograph architecture,” for example. He eschewed analyzing his work. “To analyze is very unhealthy,” he said. “The worst thing in fashion . . . is the ivory tower.” So Lagerfeld’s genius did not manifest chiefly through the commonly presumed realm of reason. “I don’t listen to my voice,” he said, “I listen to my inspiration. . . . When I like something, I don’t ask myself why,” he said. “I am like a building that has an antenna; I look at everything.” His genius may have been in both how he looked at everything (i.e., from a distinct vantage-point transcending his own day) and how his inspiration was related to the raw empirical sensory data. “I’m a story teller. From a little detail a story can be made.” The underlying mechanism is difficult to describe “Most of the time, there are strange accidents.” These are innately unprogramable and therefore beyond turning into a programmed series of steps (i.e., mechanization). “I’m not an office person, you know.” Both his unique way of looking at modernity and his inspiration were clearly not easily translated by reason. Yet curiously he viewed his sketching and writing as “the same thing,” which may imply that genius is genius underneath regardless of how it manifests.
Lagerfeld also had a unique approach to work. Believing that “there is always room to improve,” he stated, “I don’t want to rest on what I’ve done; I’m only interested in what I’m doing and what I will do.” He relished being stimulated, which is undoubtedly why he was so interested in looking at what is new at the time. “I lose interest very quickly. A lack of excitement can quickly result in a change in course, “or if people think they know better than I do” or cause complications because they think they think they are professionals. People who work to justify their salary is the worst.”
Although his father was a businessman (who made his fortune from introducing dry milk to Europe), Karl felt no need to assume a business function; he left that to others. He left business to others, though he could be accused of having had an eye for marketing his collections through elaborate shows. Even so, he was not a “business type.” For instance, he said, “People are supposed to work together. If they do, “you don’t need a contract.” A business practitioner would view this, and his dictum that he only works on things he wants to work on, as highly naïve. His lack of humility might have rubbed business practitioners the wrong way. On himself as a fashion designer, he said, “Somebody might do better, but I don’t know who.” Yet interestingly, he included himself in his observation, “Things are step by step; sometimes you go back two steps, but that is a healthy thing too.” He also valued competition, which is cherished in the business world even as its practitioners seek monopolization. “Do you know something heathier than competition?” he said, “I don’t want to rest on my success.” Friends thought he got only a few hours of sleep a night. “I’m not really a party freak, ” he remarked, “I have so little time.” As he kept working so, being open to learning more about the craft and to following through on his fits of inspiration, he may have felt he had earned the right to brag. At around 80 years of age, he still said, “My problem is to show collections that are right for the moment and right for the label.” He was corporate enough to subordinate himself under Chanel even though the company had given him free artistic license, which he regarded as necessary as part of good working conditions. Ironically, in ceding some control, the company’s CEO got more loyalty and financial success from the man. How many business practitioners past their first few promotions stay so eager to push themselves to learn more and improve rather than settle in?
Finally, the unique nature of his perspective looking out at the world as it was is in the moment, rather than looking back retrospectively, shows us how utterly distinct the vantage-point of genius is. As Fredrich Nietzsche had written in the last half of the nineteenth century in Europe, a philosopher is not a man of his time. Genius, whether analytically or artistically, can easily go beyond the status quo and its underlying operative paradigm (e.g., assumptions), and yet Lagerfeld relished the excitement from looking at modernity, which he defined as that which “is right for the moment and the next moment.” Avant guard, he noted, is an antiquated, overused word. Overused, no doubt, by minds that are not able (or willing) to transcend what they take for modernity.
Even Lagerfeld’s reason for not going back over his own story is different, and thus telling. “No memoirs,” he said, “I have nothing to say, and what I could say I don’t want to say. . . . There were important people in my life but I don’t want to give them the pleasure of mentioning them again.” Bravo! Lagerfeld was interested in history, though not of his own, which he said he already knew it so why waste time going over it? Not being moored to a particular culture, present or past, he could critique it particularly well and yet go beyond it and critique a novel trend. For instance, He said of the eighties in France: “I prefer to forget about that.” The seventies, in contrast, “were not about money.” That decade had been one of freedom. “Today if you go to a party, you bring your body-guard; there are body-guards all around.” This is an astoundingly accurate observation and indictment of the increasing security consciousness gripping the urban West. Even just the increasing intimidation in the amassed security forces by businesses and police forces by universities and cities can snuff out the atmosphere of freedom that characterized European and American culture in the 1970s. Genius is out of place, yet so vital to a people ensconced in the status quo (or what has subtly entered the status quo unexamined and perhaps even uninvited).
Sadly, I was too young to partake of the hippie culture of freedom from the late 1960s to mid 1970s; my first political memory is of the Watergate congressional hearings in which then President Nixon was dropped even by his fellow Republicans on account of his law-breaking in office. That memory, plus that of OPEC-induced gasoline shortages and President Carter’s failure to return the Americans held hostage in Iran, gave a pessimistic hue to the decade to me and many other Americans. Fortunately, Europe had a different hue, as Lagerfeld would point out: Greater freedom rather than more corruption. I share his view of the 1980s as being more about money. In Reagan’s America, prosperity was the Gospel and the rich (and business schools) thrived. I’m not surprised to learn that that spread to Europe. Lagerfeld could look back at all the wealth created back in the 1980s and still say in 2013, “Many rich people of the past are poor today (relative to today’s rich).” In spite of the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing European debt crisis, the 2010s can be said to be about the super-rich and the related widening disparity in income and wealth approaching that of the Gilded Age. As for Lagerfeld on politics, he was interested in the news (and it was relevant to fashion), but he could proudly proclaim, “I never voted in any country; I am a free European.” The man who had wanted as a child to be an illustrator when he grew up had in fact grown up to pour his genius perspective into images and cultural critiques.
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