Monte Karl on a Roll

By JAY COCKS

The Lagerfeld fashion empire blends craft and swank

He does play the part. At times, in fact, he flirts with overplaying it, right up to the tortoise-shell handle of his antique fan.

That fan. And the ponytail. And those sunglasses that sit on his nose like the windshield of a small Italian sports car. And that walk: precarious, tippy-toed, tilted so far toward the ground that his knees seem almost like the brass casters underneath an antique armchair. Calvin Klein may be the image of a pumped-up nature boy, Yves Saint Laurent of a tropical flower that would wilt in direct sunlight. But Karl Lagerfeld looks just like, unmistakably like ... well, a fashion designer.

That's the point, of course. Lagerfeld's look is part puffery, part put-on, calculated--like the luxurious clothes he designs--to divert attention from the serious business of style. "Nothing is serious in life," Lagerfeld, 46, insists.

"Nothing should look serious, because I think everything should have a light touch." At its most deft--the way it is almost always displayed to the public--Lagerfeld's touch has the lightness and much of the color of a hang glider.

It is also a little reminiscent of Midas'. Unlike most designers, who work under a single label, Lagerfeld goes three ways. He designs the couture and ready-to-wear lines for Chanel in Paris. For Fendi in Rome he does furs and some couture, as well as swank ready-to-wear. And right now his first collection under his own name is making its debut all over the world. At prices ranging from $400 for a silk blouse to $4,000 for a nifty evening number that shifts along a woman's body like a Slinky, it is moving very smartly, thanks. "The only problem is we can't get the clothes fast enough," claims Bloomingdale's Vice President Kal Ruttenstein.

Lagerfeld also has a line of fragrances manufactured by Elizabeth Arden that brings in $140 million yearly in retail sales. He designs neckties, eyeglasses (for a frame like his own: about $45) and porcelain pieces, even as he continues to work for Trevira textiles as a "fashion adviser." He does a special line of men's and women's clothes for Isetan, a leading Japanese department store group, and is pondering a serious plunge into men's wear. "Yes," he says, with a discreet suggestion of feigned resignation, "I'm afraid I will do that."

Such a multiplicity of restless talents commands and affords a variety of resting places. Lagerfeld has one in Paris that looks more like a palace. He also has a hideaway in Rome--handy for all those trips to see the Fendi sisters--and a house in Brittany, christened Grands Champs (Large Fields). Oh, yes, and there is the apartment in Monaco. The Monaco digs are hypermodern, done predominantly in the bright style of the innovative designers known as the Memphis group. The setting, like Lagerfeld's fashion, is both nervy and funny: a silk-cushioned "conversation pit" shaped like a boxing ring, an etagere that looks like a Lego construct built by an LSD casualty. The Paris house is heavily antiqued. "The most perfect moment in France for me was the 18th century," Lagerfeld says. Over in Brittany he has imported fountains, even torn down stands of trees, to restore the house to its original glory. "Anybody who saw him there who didn't know him would say, 'Who's that megalomaniac who thinks he's Louis XIV?' " observes his favorite model and close friend, Ines de la Fressange. "But it's a place that he really loves and where his mother lived until she died. It's a place he really feels happy in."

Lagerfeld, on the face of things, is used to being happy. Certainly he has had a lifetime of being rich. Born in Hamburg to an elegant Westphalian mother and a father who owned one of Europe's largest dairy companies, young Karl grew up in the countryside of Schleswig-Holstein, taught by tutors. When he was twelve, his mother went to Hamburg to inroll him in art school. Karl wanted to be a portrait painter, but the art school director pointed out that "your son isn't interested in art, he's only interested in clothes." Lagerfeld promoted this shortcoming into a virtue by turning quickly to fashion design. At 16, he entered a design competition and won. Another winner was also a teenager, named Yves Saint Laurent.

Since then, Yves has been the looming figure perpetually getting in the way of Karl's owned and operated spotlight. Although he insists that Saint Laurent is "the high-fashion designer I prefer to all the other ones," Lagerfeld created a furor last spring with an interview in the Paris-based monthly Actuel in which he had some saucy things to say about his fellow designer. Certainly the reflections (which Lagerfeld claims were not intended for publication) were not out of character for a man who says, "I respect nothing, no one, including myself. Respect is not a very creative thing. Imagine me respecting Chanel. We would go nowhere."

Le Scandale is like an extra bit of beading on the French high-fashion scene, and Lagerfeld is the regent of irreverence. He will compliment competitors mildly, or personally, but be mindful never to accord them full professional honors. He is almost equally airy about himself. He keeps none of his fashion drawings, insists with only a hint of irony that he sees himself "as just working class," and has no patience with the notion of fashion as either a higher calling or a tough grind. "What must be hell in life," he muses, "is to have a job to make a living. What a bore." But Lagerfeld nevertheless works as if his life depended on it. "I'm an active person, born lazy," he says with a soigne shrug. He apprenticed at Balmain and Patou and, by the time he was 21, was designing for Krizia and Chloe. He still wakes up at 5 a.m.--'As soon as day breaks, he's already in a three-piece suit," says a friend--and works alone until late morning.

Lagerfeld may not save his own drawings, but he has a huge library of fashion history on which to draw and Chanel archives from before World War II more complete than the Chanel company's own. He knows exactly how a fabric can be worked, and if he left an honorary teaching post in Vienna a year ago partly because the students "were too serious," he nonetheless keeps working because he is an exemplary craftsman. He remains almost as dissatisfied with his own creations as he is with anything done by his competition. "I'm never totally pleased," he says. "I'm a kind of fashion nymphomaniac who never gets an orgasm. I'm always expecting something from the next time."

What he never expects is art. He is always at pains to make fashion seem no more than a congenial avocation. Says the model De la Fressange, who has signed a hefty exclusive contract to work for Chanel: "I'd be the first one to say fashion is important, a cultural phenomenon and all that. But when we're working late and it's two o'clock in the morning, I always want to say, 'Oh, it's all just a bunch of rags.' The great thing, though, is that Karl will say it before I do." For Lagerfeld, dressing up gives "a kind of optical relief to life," and luxury is a veritable state of grace.

There are also fleeting suggestions, beneath all his mocking worldliness, of a slightly unquiet spirit. He is a demon for order and travels to the doctor's office with a shoehorn so he can replace his footwear easily after an exam. "He thinks he's ugly," says Ines, who will sometimes sneak up and start tickling him to make him smile. He frets over whether to have a nose job. His hands always seem to be in motion, partly because he is always moving his sleeves to hide them. That restlessness also colors his imagination, which can be entrepreneurial, as in his double-F logo for the Fendis that appears, like a ranch brand, on all their leather goods; elegant, as in his sumptuous evening wear; or easy, as in some of the simple, savvy suits he did for this fall's Karl Lagerfeld line. He grabs ideas everywhere. He designed a Fendi ermine cape based on the furrows of a plowed field. Polaroids of a fireworks display seen from his Monaco balcony inspired embroideries for dresses in his own spring line, which will be shown next month in Paris.

The fashion press, which shows reverence for his work and dotes on his ebullience, has taken to calling Lagerfeld Monte Karl, as if he were some kind of vintage decadent out of Somerset Maugham. Lagerfeld has raised no objection to the name; indeed, as a man who writes his own press kits and describes the "elegant aerodynamics" of his Chanels, he surely knows the value of a catchy moniker. It makes him sound comfortably unlike the world-class designer that he is, hardly the creator of dresses that may, in time, end up where he would probably least like to see them: in museums. "Fashion is only fashion when somebody's wearing it," he is fond of saying. That might mean the best of what Lagerfeld does is something a little bit more than fashion. He can claim not to like that. But he will certainly have to think about it. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Dorie Denbigh/Paris

With reporting by Dorie Denbigh