Fashion is supposed to be, among other things, about taste. But good taste can only take a person so far. As Diana Vreeland had it: “Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life.” Vreeland, who edited American Vogue in the Sixties, believed in vulgarity almost as passionately as she believed in red and pink and well-polished shoes. Without it, one might easily die of boredom: “A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste …. No taste is what I’m against.”
When the death of the designer Karl Lagerfeld from cancer was announced on Tuesday, I thought of Vreeland, his only real rival in fashion when it comes to wit (not that there’s much competition). The two of them had various things in common: their striking, not to say odd, looks; their tendency to adjust their biographies; their aptitude for dashing, if ultimately meaningless, pronouncements. Above all, they both understood that good taste needs always to be leavened with a dash of bad: a little something to raise carefully manicured eyebrows. Look at a photograph of almost any collection designed by Lagerfeld and, even as you admire this jacket, that dress, there will always be one detail – a few too many pearls, a frill that is, well, simply too frilly – that falls into the category of vulgar.
Such vulgarity – or bad taste, call it what you will – was ever-present in his own realm, too: the ponytail, the fingerless gloves, the diamante belt buckles. Lagerfeld, a walking, talking pageant of high and low, liked to mix it up: an urge born of the confidence that comes with being cultured in a world (fashion) where culture is not always at a premium. He knew all about opera, furniture and architecture. The owner of a vast library, he could read in several languages.
He collected, among other things, jewellery designed by the great Suzanne Belperron, whose clients included Colette and Jean Cocteau. Why should he care what others thought of his too-tight jeans matched with a tuxedo? Of the tie upon which an image of his beloved Birman cat, Choupette, had been carefully embroidered, presumably by one of his own obliging petites mains?
Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg in 1933. His father, Otto, made his money from condensed milk; his mother, Elisabeth, was a former lingerie saleswoman who seemingly styled herself as a Cruella de Vil-style figure (it was Mutti dearest who told Karl his hands were ugly, hence the gloves). Naturally, this did not dismay her son; in fact, it rather turned him on. In interviews, he claimed to have relished her sternness, her impatience, her plain speaking – and, to a degree, he aped them. To her we may trace Lagerfeld’s workaholism (he designed some 14 collections a year), his way with insults (“I think tattoos are horrible – it’s like living in a Pucci dress full time”), and his fear of abandonment (he fell out with his muse, the French model Inès de la Fressange, when she married, unable to share her).
Having left home at 14, Lagerfeld finished his education in Paris. Already in thrall to fashion, and an excellent sketcher, in 1954, his design for a woollen coat received a prize from the Secrétariat International de la Laine, an award he shared with Yves St Laurent, later to become his life-long rival (St Laurent had created a dress). Apprenticed to Balmain, one of its judges, he then worked at Jean Patou. In 1964, he joined Chloé, the first of two stints at the label; in 1965, he joined the furrier Fendi, with whom he stayed until his death. Finally, in 1983, he arrived at Chanel.
The label was then in the doldrums, reliant on sales of scent and suits to middle-aged women (Coco had died in 1971). It was Lagerfeld’s job to drag it swiftly into the present.
His mission was soon accomplished. First, there were his designs – not only edgier and sexier, but often echoing Chanel as it had been in the 1930s (to pinch once more from Vreeland: “the dégagé gypsy skirts, the divine brocades, the little boleros…”). Second, there was the label’s logo, deployed by Lagerfeld with more alacrity than was strictly decent.
Once again, Chanel was the fashion status symbol. It spoke, as it always had, of taste and money, but now it came with a hint of fun, too. In the early 1990s I had a boss who owned a black Chanel suit, an item she wore like armour (she needed it, given the way some of our male colleagues behaved). But there was something cute about it, too, for its sleeves were trimmed with marabou, as if it were a negligee and made of diaphanous silk, rather than a boxy jacket constructed from tweed.
In the days after Lagerfeld’s death, there were all the usual breathless tributes from the fashion world – and then, just as predictably, the accusations from other quarters of misogyny (the designer had called the singer Adele “too fat”, accused “fat mummies” of being envious of thin models, and dismissed the #MeToo movement).
As a feminist who loves clothes, and thinks they’re important – as someone once said, they are the furniture of the mind made visible and, on occasion, the very mirror of an epoch’s soul – I see it from both sides: the brilliance at the drawing board, and the bully who didn’t like to see his female employees in flat shoes.
One doesn’t necessarily cancel out the other. And he will be sorely missed. It’s fantastic that so many women are now running the big houses: making clothes for their own gender, with all the sympathy that involves. But Lagerfeld is the last of the last. After him, there is only marketing, PR-speak and certain boredom.