KARL LAGERFELD 1933–2019
KARL IS DEAD’. The shock of the stark headlines that announced Karl Lagerfeld’s passing on the morning of February 19 were like a bludgeon to the head. He had died in Paris at the age of 85, serving to prove his mortality, which some of fashion’s more mischievous gossips had started to question. “I don’t care what happens when I have gone,” he once told me in an interview, acutely aware of the vacuum that would be left with his death. “I am only interested in my work.”
Lagerfeld was fashion’s most prolific — and arguably most powerful — designer, creating 10 collections per year for Chanel, as well as Fendi’s womenswear and the ranges for his eponymous line. He was a brilliant illustrator with a hand capable of drafting distinctive soft-focus sketches at lightning speed as if it were an automaton with a mind
