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Whether you know him for his miniature figurines, beloved cat, or extraordinary career at Chanel, few would argue that Karl Lagerfeld embodies everything it means to be a legendary designer. A persona in his own right, the lasting image of the creative director remains his sleek white ponytail and high-collared suits. However, outside of his longtime collaborators and employees, few knew the man behind the enigmatic mask. That is what Karl, the new documentary debuting at the Telluride Film Festival this week, sets out to portray.
The project charts the course of Lagerfeld’s life and career through interviews and never-before-seen personal correspondences, from his childhood in Hamburg to his movements between luxury houses including Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, and eventually (and most famously) his 36-year-long tenure at Chanel. But beyond his résumé, there’s a profound sense of intimacy that he held with his closest collaborators, including sound director Michel Gaubert, Chanel’s head of communications Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre, and set designer Stefan Lubrina—many of whom become emotional when speaking about the late designer to this day. Many more muses and confidants appear as well, such as Tilda Swinton, Lily-Rose Depp, and Tom Ford.
Courtesy of Republic Pictures
Tilda Swinton sharing memories of Karl Lagerfeld’s artistry in the documentary.
“I think the stereotype of Karl was that he was kind of cold, distant, sort of grand, and condescending,” director Nick Hooker tells ELLE. As soon as he began researching for the film, Hooker could tell that this preconceived notion was not the case at all. Beneath those dark sunglasses was a deeply cultured and complex individual.
“He was a boy who discovered the 18th century, who discovered beauty, discovered fashion, discovered a way of living at Versailles—he discovered it at a moment in his life that was as dark, violent, and traumatic as one can imagine,” Hooker adds, referencing Lagerfeld’s experience witnessing Operation Gomorrah—the Allied bombing of Hamburg—an event he rarely spoke about openly. Hooker believes—along with others featured in the film—that Lagerfeld’s discovery of Versailles and the Princess Palatine, an 18th-century German who married into the French royal family, helped shape the reverence for grandiose beauty that defined both his work at Chanel and his personal iconography.
Courtesy of Republic Pictures
A snapshot from inside the Chanel atelier.
Though the documentary aims to dissect and soften Lagerfeld’s image, what is perhaps still most impressive to learn about—in any form—is the scale of his career and how it changed the mainstream perception of fashion designers forever. He cut his teeth working in Paris during an immense time of change. The ’60s saw the youthquake movement and Beatlemania, the ’70s ushered in the rise of luxury ready-to-wear and witnessed the American-French designer showdown at the Battle of Versailles, and the ’80s experienced a full-throttle embrace of luxe glamour.
By the time he got to Chanel in 1983, the house felt like a crystalized image lost in time, adrift and too attached to its older clientele since the passing of Gabrielle Chanel in 1971. In some ways, within the quickly modernizing fashion world, it could have even been described as stale. Explains Hooker, “I was told by Marie-Louise de Clermont Tonnerre, she’d had dinner with Hubert de Givenchy the night before Karl took over [Chanel], and he said, ‘What’s he going to do over there? What’s going to happen?’” Later, Lagerfeld would go on to say that he wanted to preserve the essence of Chanel, doing exactly the same as before, but also completely the opposite—adding that he’d enjoy if its legendary founder and namesake was rolling in her grave, because it meant that Chanel was still alive.
Cara Delevingne and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel’s fall/winter 2014 supermarket show.
Over the course of the documentary, Hooker also hones in on Lagerfeld’s skill as a creative director and technical ability as a designer—something that the Chanel atelier employees also emphasize. Many of the house’s shows staged at the Grand Palais in Paris, such as the Chanel supermarket or live rocket launch, stand as clear examples.
“I realized there’s this kind of other-dimensional quality to the really great designers,” Hooker notes. “They’re like magicians. They use all these devices—theater, fashion, design, music, media, photography, television, [and] Instagram—to cast these spells and seduce [the audience].” And for many designers, that’s the difference between a tastemaker and a world-builder.
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