Karl Largerfield: I Have a Famous Cat

Article

“I have a famous cat,” said Mr. Lagerfeld, glancing over the cat-printed notepads offered to him and Choupette. (She has more than 46,000 fans on the Twitter account invented in her honor, turns up frequently in the pages of fashion magazines and has inspired a line of makeup by Shu Uemura.) Mr. Lagerfeld said he hoped the cat would become more famous than him. “Then I can disappear behind Choupette,” he said.

There’s no history. I don’t even have archives, myself. I keep nothing. What I like is to do — not the fact that I did. It doesn’t excite me at all. When people start to think that what they did in the past is perhaps even better than what they do now, they should stop. Lots of my colleagues, they have archives, they look at their dresses like they were Rembrandts! Please, forget about it.

Do you worry about not having enough ideas? I wouldn’t expect so.

No, no, no. I don’t believe in waiting for inspiration. The French say, l’appétit vient en mangeant, the ideas come when you work. I work a lot for the garbage can. I have huge bins next [to me], for whatever I do, 95 percent goes to the bin.

It’s like Einstein apparently said: 99 percent perspiration, 1 percent inspiration.
Continue reading the main story

He was very funny and very clever, even if my brain is not exactly his. He was pretty right. You know, Einstein had a huge sense of humor.

Do you have a good sense of humor?

I hope so.

Is there a place for humor in fashion?

I don’t think that most of the designers have a very quick sense of humor. They take themselves very seriously because they want to be taken as artists. I think we are artisans. It’s an applied art. There’s nothing bad about that. If you want to do art, then show it in a gallery. Photo

So you don’t consider yourself an artist?

No, no, no, no. I’m a designer, I do photos, I do books, I’m a publisher, but I don’t have the self-proclaimed label “artist.” I hate that. Very pretentious. If other people say it, it’s very flattering, but if you start to say it yourself, you better forget about it.

Speaking of photography: You shoot the Fendi campaigns, the Chanel campaigns, even some Dior Homme campaigns, and for magazines. Why? Is it a pleasure, or just a different type of work?

If it was not a pleasure, I wouldn’t do it. Second, it’s quite important. If you do only collections, you end up in an ivory tower. You finish the collection and you are isolated until the time to get to the next one. That would be very boring. It’s very bad and unhealthy to get isolated. Already I don’t walk in the street, so I have to do something, somewhere.

You don’t walk in the street because you’re too famous now? People stop you?

Exactly, all over the world. We live in the world of selfies.

Do you like selfies?

I don’t do selfies. But other people do, and they all want to do selfies with me. No, no, no. Thank God, Sébastien, my assistant, he’s mean to the people in the street, mean and rude. I’m a nice person.

Do you keep an eye on the work of other designers, your competitors?

Yes, I look at many things. I don’t see it like competition. I like when there are many people who do good things, because you work better if there is competition than if there are only third-rate people. Paris cannot be Paris only with one. But from me to you, there are very few who have, in terms of craftsmanship, the craftsmanship of high-quality couture. For me, the best — I won’t talk about Chanel, because they have the biggest operation, with 250 workers for the whole couture — is Dior and Givenchy. The others, I prefer not to comment. I am not a fashion journalist.

Have you begun to work on the haute fourrure?

It’s working in my mind, but now I have to get rid of the season of the ready-to-wear, so I have to do Fendi, then Chanel, then we have to do the cruise, then we have to do this. ...

Is it difficult to design for so many labels?

When I’m at Fendi, I don’t even remember what I am doing somewhere else, and if I am somewhere else, I forgot what I did here. What I do for Chanel never looks like Fendi. I have no personality. Perhaps I have three.

Do you foresee a time when you might stop?

No. I would die on the spot. Chanel died in the middle of a collection when she was in her nearly 90s. I have time! In fashion, you think about six months, six months, six months. Now it’s even three months, three months, three months. The world is different. There’s no faraway future, it’s no futuristic thing. Fashion is something people are supposed to consume immediately, not in 10 years.