Will things ever be the same again? Might up become down? Could Pakistan rule the world? Will '60s muscle cars never again growl down your street in a post-oil landscape? Are $5000 handbags going the way of the dodo? Has the shocking decline in luxury good sales affected legendary couturier Karl Lagerfeld?
"For Mr. Lagerfeld, cutting back his own spending at Chanel is not part of his 'new modesty' strategy. He said he is not being forced by the private company’s owners to bend or adapt because of financial constraints. 'We have no budget, we do what we want and throwing money out the window brings money back in through the front door,' he said. 'The bottom line is that I don’t deal with the bottom line. The luxury in my life is I never have to think about it.'(courtesy NYTimes.com)
Thank God for small victories. "Barkeep! Another bottle of Chateau Lafite to celebrate the magnificent infallibility of the mega-rich and tasteless!"
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5 comments:
little Otto has one of the better Wikipedia biographies I've read in a while:
- "...so I spent two years mostly on beaches – I guess I studied life."
- "Karl Lagerfeld is to design limited edition homes on Isla Moda, the world’s first dedicated fashion island" in Dubai
- "Lagerfeld is the host of fictional radio station 'K109 - The Studio' in the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV."
- "The tofu pies hurled by the protestors went astray, however, and hit Calvin Klein (described by PETA as 'friendly fire'). ...[Lagerfeld] The 75-year-old German boss of fashion house Chanel claims anti-fur protesters are "childish" and argues hunted animals would kill their human predators if they could."
- "When Lagerfeld lost 42 kg (roughly 92.6 pounds) in 13 months, his explanation was '...I suddenly wanted to dress differently, to wear clothes designed by Hedi Slimane'"
- Lagerfeld owns several hundred iPods. He keeps them all over the world, in his various houses and apartments, so that he always has music at the ready whenever he stops in.
As for Karl's losing an amount of flesh equal to that of an entire adolescent girl, he has possibly to the most German diet philosophy I've ever encountered:
"You are a general and you have a single soldier in your army. You must give him instructions and he must carry them out. It may annoy him but he has no choice... Do you have enough moral strength? ...Without real commitment, without the determination to understand and accept the diet, all those who embark upon it are destined to failure."
He does not, however, recommend any physical exertion as it "runs the risk of making you hungry," nor any regimen tied to clock or schedule ("The only calendar I follow is that of circumstance and desire").
As for the impetus behind such sacrifice, "A respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul."
Finally, Lagerfeld stopped talking and agreed to give a tour of the
house. After warning, "You will think I'm a madman," he led the way up
a grand curving marble staircase. The second floor is composed of huge
rooms with soaring ceilings, ornate plasterwork, wood panelling, and
fifteen-foot-high mirrors. The furniture, a mixture of antique and
modernist pieces, was almost impossible to see, hidden under hundreds
of magazines, CDs, photographs, promotional brochures, and books,
which lay in heaps spilling on every surface, including the floors.
Scattered through the rooms were dozens of iPod nanos of every hue.
Each one was loaded with songs that Lagerfeld listens to when
designing his collections, which he does, he says, usually in the
mornings, while dressed in a long white smock. Surveying the scene
through his black glasses, Lagerfeld said serenely, "Normal people
think I'm insane."
He spends most of his time in a thousand-square-foot room, at the
center of which sat a modern fourposter bed. The posts were made of
fluorescent bulbs, and a sable bedspread was strewn with paperbacks
and magazines and more iPods. Lagerfeld says that he sleeps seven
hours a night in this bed; he also spends considerable time lounging
on it during his waking hours, reading and drawing. There was a large
desk a few feet away, piled with papers, sketchbooks, magazines,
books, newspapers, and art supplies. Lagerfeld complains that his desk
kept getting "buried." To deal with the problem, he recently bought
four more desks. They got buried, too. A Mac G5 computer was visible
among the messy stacks of books and papers on a long table at the foot
of his bed, but Lagerfeld insists that he rarely uses it and does not
surf the Internet—partly because he is fearful of how it might
compromise his privacy. "I don't want to be on the Internet," he said.
"I hardly use a credit card—everything where you can be fixed. I'm
floating. Nobody can catch me, mmm?"
He led the way into a room that had a huge table heaped with more
books, CDs, DVDs, photographs, iPods, and magazines. "Look," he said,
sounding a little amazed. "It goes on and on and on." He considered
for a moment. "But I love it!" He claims to know where everything is,
and it's not an idle boast. On several occasions during the afternoon,
he disappeared into these rooms to fetch things, including a copy of
the Colette novel "Mitsou," which provided the inspiration for a
recent Chanel photo campaign that he had shot, and a copy of "The
Emperor's New Clothes," which he had illustrated with paintings made
entirely with cosmetics. He returned in minutes with the books.
"This is the room for the jeans, the shirts, the jewelry, the ties,
the gloves, and things like this," he said, entering a narrow room
lined with shelves. On the top of a bureau were perhaps two hundred
pairs of fingerless gloves, arranged in neat piles according to color
(he explained that he chose the gray pair he's wearing because of the
overcast sky). There are also dozens of pairs of jeans, and belts laid
out by the hundred. In a tray on another bureau were tangles of Chrome
Hearts necklaces, rings, buckles, clasps, pins, brooches; on shelves
below, scores of white shirts were stacked. Next door was a windowless
room containing a dozen garment racks on wheels, each one stuffed with
suits—perhaps five hundred in all—in black or gray hues. "I have suits
here I've never worn," Lagerfeld said. "To normal people it may look
sick, huh?" He shrugged. "I don't know what 'normal' means, anyway."
He went into a room that looked like a bookstore stockroom during the
Christmas season, and suddenly his attention was caught by a stack of
dusty leather-bound tomes. "This is something I want to publish," he
said, opening the book at the top of the stack. "This is the first
German illustrated weekly paper, called the Neue Berliner
Illustrierte. And thank God it was preserved, because very little
survived. This is a complete set. I just found it in Germany."
In a small anteroom, amid more heaped books and magazines, was a black
and red grand piano of sleek modernistic design. "I designed this for
the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Steinway," Lagerfeld said.
"I'm not very gifted as a piano player, so I'm giving it away as a
Christmas gift." At the base of a small armchair were six plastic bags
stuffed with folded papers. "These are newspapers I bought and haven't
had time to read yet," he said. "I go through the most important, and
the rest are unimportant things—they can wait."
wow.
these are all fascinating Karl Lagerfeld tidbits.
a man after my own heart, it appears;
i admire his ability to constantly fulfill his every desire and never worry about two things that are forefront in the minds of many people--poverty and failure.
But on the other hand, he's also a totally arrogant and wasteful lush whose very life mocks the suffering of the majority of the world.
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