Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 4:30 p.m., September 22, 2021, modified at 5:00 p.m., September 22, 2021
In an issue of the program "Historically yours" devoted to personalities who have confused the tracks of their own life, Stéphane Bern tells the story of the life of Karl Lagerfeld.
He then interviews Marie Ottavi, journalist and author of "Karl", a biography that disentangles the true from the false in the life of this true genius of fashion.
INTERVIEW
"His mystery still hangs over. There are a lot of questions Karl Lagerfeld hasn't answered."
This statement is signed by a person who has yet clarified many of the mysteries in the life of the couturier, journalist Marie Ottavi.
She signs
Karl
, a biography which aims to disentangle the truth from the false in the account of the life of Karl Lagerfeld.
Because the image of the designer of Chanel is both clear and floating.
She looms large in articles praising a man with many faces and changing truths that repetitive questioning often fails to clarify.
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Starting with his birth, in Hamburg, Germany.
September 10, 1938. Or is it 1935?
or 1933?
The treasure hunt around the year in which it was born occupied commentators for a long time.
Until a German daily published his baptismal certificate: in 1933 then.
This will not prevent Lagerfeld from continuing to stir up trouble by claiming that his mother had changed the date on the document.
"I wasn't even born on September 10," he said.
"A first lie that will determine all the others"
"In my book, I publish a copy of one of his passports which dates from the 1970s, where we see that Karl has rewritten his passport by hand to rewrite the date", explains Marie Ottavi in
Historically yours
. "It was going a long way. They had, with her cousin, decided at a very young age to be five years younger. On her tombstone, there is still the false date of birth. It is the first lie that will probably determine all the others."
"This is what is fascinating with him. He is an ultra-media character, but who comes behind his aphorisms, his quotes, his hundreds of interviews that I have read about him, to always hide his deep self" , continues the journalist.
"Besides, he hated psychoanalysis and refused to lie down on a couch. For him, going back to his past and looking back was already admitting a somewhat disastrous past with his parents."
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"It also explains the fact that he is getting 5 years younger. It is not just coquetry, even if it is too. It is a way of not answering questions about the fact that he would have known war. For him, it was impossible to achieve ", estimates Marie Ottavi. "He was born in 1933, which is a terrible year for the German people. It is the advent of Nazism. And he is also probably angry with his parents and that his father is the guardian of his life, even himself. he is very marked by his mother. For him, it is the original fault. "
To be born in 1938 as Karl Lagerfeld has long claimed, would therefore attest to what he repeated over and over again about a childhood during which he would not have really suffered the war or the pangs of Nazism.
However, he did see the flags adorned with swastikas fluttering.
He saw the refugees flocking when Germany was at bay.
He slept well in a barn behind his own house when the Allies requisitioned the family home.
Did he suffer from it?
Surely.
So as much to erase this childhood that he has always described as boring, simply busy drawing, reading and, already, dressing elegantly.
Few friends, two great enemies
Karl Lagerfeld was therefore 20 years old (and not 15 years old as he claimed) when he arrived with his mother in Paris in 1952. Karl Lagerfeld won the first prize in a fashion competition the following year, tied. with other young designers, including a certain Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, who will soon be known as Yves Saint Laurent. First steps in fashion and the beginning of a relationship with the future great couturier, who between friendship, jealousy and rivalries, will also spill a lot of ink.
“Karl was very close to Saint Laurent when they started out,” confirms Marie Ottavi.
"But fashion is not really a very friendly world. Gossip is almost cultural in the fashion world. There isn't really a bunch of friends. Yves Saint Laurent, for example, is interested in very few other designer dressmakers. Lagerfeld will still get close to Galliano when he's on top. Then he'll be pretty hard on him when he's going to fall. "
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According to the journalist, Karl Lagerfeld has above all "two great enemies". "Pierre Bergé, with whom he is very angry. For him, he separated him from Saint Laurent, his first friend. And Azzedine Alaïa", she explains. "He's going to be very hard on them. Really ruthless. There is no political correctness. The pikes he can say in private, he is going to say them publicly in interviews as well."
"He is very ambivalent and that's what I wanted to show in this biography: the people who knew him and loved him saw that they could be very harsh, very arrogant. This is the image that "he wanted to give. This is the first image that the general public has of him: someone severe and brittle, very eloquent", observes the biographer.
"But he's also an extremely funny person, who respected everything and everyone in his studio. He had a deep respect for those people who had no power, like little hands."
A father fantasized by rejection of the truth
Karl Lagerfeld quickly became a brilliant stylist.
He entered various houses, Balmain, Patou and a little later Chloé, Fendi and others, aware that the future was in ready-to-wear rather than in haute-couture.
This did not prevent him from taking the reins of Maison Chanel, to which he restored its letters of nobility in the 1980s.
Before Chanel, between the 1950s and 1970s, Karl worked a lot and frequented all of Paris.
He shines with his spirit, his immense culture and his 18th century noble airs that his inimitable accent completes.
He is after all an aristocrat!
His father is a Danish baron… Or rather Swedish as he says later.
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In reality, his father is neither a baron nor Swedish, but a rich industrialist, very German.
If it is surely useful to have Scandinavian rather than Germanic origins in post-war France, it is also convenient to deal with possible questions on the few compromises with the Nazi regime, which were very real.
“We discovered very recently that his parents were nevertheless involved in Nazi associations,” confirms Marie Ottavi. “Her father, in order to continue producing milk, had been somewhat obliged to join Nazi groups.
This is something Karl Lagerfeld has always hidden. "
"Instead of assuming to be the victim of this brutal mother, he makes her a lifeline"
This father, Karl Lagerfeld seems to want to downplay its importance, describing a distant and absent man.
A man who certainly influenced him in his relationship to success and incessant work.
A multilingual man who has had a thousand lives, between Germany, Venezuela and Russia.
"Karl Lagerfeld is very hard on his parents, but he knows how to play with it very well. He knows perfectly well what it will provoke in the minds of people," says Marie Ottavi.
"His father is almost too nice for him to respect him," she analyzes.
"All the witnesses tell me that Karl Lagerfeld's father, Otto Lagerfeld, was a fairly good man, generous, rather good-natured, very busy with his business."
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The person Karl Lagerfeld talks about the most is his mother. Was she a great bourgeois? An aviator? A regular at Berlin nights of the Roaring Twenties? In any case, according to the stylist, she is a castrating mother, bordering on cruelty. A tough, ironic, acerbic, selfish woman, although sometimes generous. He looks like he's painting a portrait of himself there. And however terrible she may have been, the great couturier will welcome her for a long time by his side. And it is in the castle he acquired in Brittany that she died in 1978.
"His mother was quite stiff. There are people who tell me she was not as hard as he described. But others still confirmed to me that she was a severe woman with spirit, ”says
Karl's
author
.
"Karl Lagerfeld talks about how difficult she is. But instead of accepting being the victim of this mother who is really brutal, he makes her a lifeline. She has a lot of definitive sentences. He is going to make mottos out of her. which he will follow throughout his life. "
"He was almost fired from Chanel"
The success helping, Karl jumps from one house to another, as he juggles languages, he who speaks fluently English, German and French. Each idiom allows him to reason differently. This ability to change language, way of thinking, domestic environment as much as professional, testifies that Karl Lagerfeld hates immobility. "Change is the healthiest way to survive," he will say. This will not prevent him from experiencing a great slump.
"At the end of the 1990s, it was a bit complicated for him at Chanel", modestly estimates Marie Ottavi.
"Bruno Pavlovsky, who is at the head of Chanel, explained to me that he was even almost dismissed, because he could no longer follow the trends. To manage to hold out for so long is already completely exceptional. Often, the creators, the great couturiers are ten years old. It will last much longer. Perhaps by marking less in fashion than Saint-Laurent. But in any case, it will last. That it was weak at Chanel, we didn't know. It was completely silent. No one would admit it until then. "
"I don't want to be a reality in other people's lives"
"He regains control, loses a lot of weight, becomes the figure we now know and who has managed to mark the spirits", adds the biographer. "But he was still overweight for quite a few years. He will do what I jokingly call his 'remountada'. He will multiply the parades, suggest to Chanel to add two per year, to do more and more spectacular things. He will work a lot on the image. It is at the heart of fashion today, that's what makes groups earn a lot of money. He always had the sense of that."
This sense of image can be found when Karl Lagerfeld prefers to hide his yet gentle and amiable gaze behind the haughty mask of dark glasses that he never takes off, at least in public.
More than an outfit, it's a real uniform.
He disappears behind the habit.
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Permanently blurring the tracks on his life and his origins allows him to become a kind of being above ground, without past and without history, whose carnal substance almost evaporates behind the garment.
A being that it is therefore easier to shape as it pleases.
“I don't want to be a reality in other people's lives,” he said.
"I want to be an apparition."
A chosen solitude
"Karl was very lonely. And he always took it. He probably suffered it when he lost the great man of his life, Jacques de Bascher. He will never admit it, but ten years ago anyway. Because we may be Karl Lagerfeld, absence is there. It holds you, "imagines Marie Ottavi. "But he's a great loner. He always was. When he was young, at school, he found his classmates badly dressed. He lived in the country, he was very contemptuous. He will choose to be alone all his life. , until the end."
Karl Lagerfeld left photographic works and hundreds of collections but, according to specialists, he leaves no real legacy. There is no such thing as a "Lagerfeld style". Rather a way of capturing and extrapolating the trend, of adapting it to the number, a way of having understood before others the transition from craftsmanship to industry, in addition to being a marketing gift. What he leaves is not really a work, it is himself, or rather the image he had chosen for himself. And what does the truth matter after all, according to the fashion designer who said: "I can lie to everyone, but I cannot lie to myself."