Original subtitles

Do you think you are the only one

who really knows who you are?

[IN FRENCH] I have spent so much time playing a role

that it's almost impossible for anyone to know who I really am.

And even for those I care about the most,

I want it to be impossible.

Karl Lagerfeld,

the German-born Paris designer

who has been called "The King of Fashion."

He designs for three labels,

he's a professional photographer as well,

he creates and publishes books under his own imprint.

He is a legend in his own time.

I don't want to be a reality in other people's lives.

I want to be a fleeting presence.

Appearing and disappearing.

That's the secret of the story I believe.

Karl was an 18th century man

and a 21st century man.

He was the past, the present and the future.

Karl loved being more French than the French.

He used fashion like paint.

It was a medium.

He was an incredible storyteller.

Every single collection of Karl

is such a love letter to women.

Karl will be remembered for the icon that he created

that was himself.

LILY-ROSE: He felt very untouched by everything.

He felt very preserved

in this childlike wonder that he had.

He really is that little boy dreaming.

Karl Lagerfeld, a German living in Paris,

is a world-renowned designer.

I never grew up.

I did the same thing when I was five.

I find that very amusing.

He designs fabrics

and the luxury Ready-to-Wear collection

for the house of Chloe.

What I enjoy the most is designing fabrics.

I love doing it as much as some people enjoy painting.

That's almost my... my Sunday activity.

I wanted to be a portraitist.

But as my mother told me,

"You were born too late for that.

"No one needs that anymore."

I sketched all the time.

The only toys and things that I asked for

were paper and pencils, and books.

I discovered French culture

through the letters of Princess Palatine.

MARIE-LOUISE: Princess Palatine was the sister-in-law of Louis XIV.

Karl loved talking about her stories

because she was witty, because she was German,

because she was married to a homosexual person.

He loved everything about Princess Palatine.

It's the daily life at Versailles,

and all the gossips of Versailles,

and Karl liked gossips.

The French 18th century is like a spine.

It was not mine to begin with,

but I have appropriated this spiritual heritage.

I only wanted to learn one thing,

and that was French,

because I wanted to get to Paris.

And then my mother said, "You better go to Paris

because Hamburg is a door to the world,

but it's just a door."

My mother said,

"There are people who get lost and others who don't,

and my son belongs to the category that does not get lost.

He knows exactly what he wants."

There was a big poster all over Paris

about a contest for amateurs, saying,

"Send a coat or a dress in a sample of wool."

So, I made sketches, sent them,

and got first prize for the coat.

And the boy who got the prize for the dress

was Yves Saint Laurent.

He was a schoolboy then too.

It was Pierre Balmain who made my coat and he asked me,

"What do you want to do?"

I told him I was still at school and he said,

"Why don't you join me as an assistant?"

That's how I started.

My first day when I started to work at Balmain,

I said to myself, instead of the rest of the life,

it's to commit suicide.

But I said to myself, "You're not here as an art critic,

"you are here to learn."

Back then, we had to bring out all the details,

the embroideries, every single flower, every little thing.

That's why I draw clothes so well.

You had to be able to see every stitch and every detail in the clothes.

I started as an assistant.

There were six other people a hundred times older than I.

And six months later, they were all fired,

and I was a boss.

And after that, I worked for a few years for Patou,

and I was the art director of the Patou.

That's where I really learned the trade from the head seamstresses

who'd worked in the '20s and '30s and knew fabrics.

Some of them were 75 years old,

and they were better than the youngsters.

Who do you work for?

For almost 20 different businesses of all kinds.

When Karl arrived at Chloe,

Gaby Aghion was an incredible woman

who was running that house.

So, Karl at Chloe invented

the Pret-a-Porter that wasn't coming from

a couture house.

Karl was hungry.

He wanted to see, he wanted to know,

he wanted to hear.

And I used to see him with Antonio Lopez.

Antonio Lopez was a very talented American illustrator

from Puerto Rico.

So, the three, they were like a little triangle of creativity.

Karl, Gaby, and Antonio.

Antonio would do the sketches,

and I would model them.

And Karl would come up with these concepts.

In America, when I first started modelling,

black beauty was not considered beautiful.

But when I arrived in Paris,

Karl saw all races as one bouquet.

We came along from New York

with the sounds of America,

and the energy, the freedom.

We were liberated women, and we were beyond couture.

We were just kids from the street who dressed up.

Look, how does this look, darling? Beautiful.

It was just us playing around

and ripping things up,

and everybody was so excited to build an outfit.

We were combining these new feelings of pop art

in America with the 1920s.

Fashion was art,

it was underground, it was drag,

it was Candy Darling,

and the combination with Karl's

refined European royal nature.

Mr. Lagerfeld, where do you get your inspiration?

I'm like the skyscrapers with all the TV antennas.

With many antennas and picking up signals everywhere.

[IN ENGLISH] I hated to be out of Paris for more than 24 hours.

There was the feeling that wherever you were in Europe,

you did whatever you had to do to make it back to Paris

for drinks at the Cafe de Flore, and dancing at Le Sept.

The Club Sept was some kind of little Eden in Paris.

Karl Lagerfeld was very present with Antonio

and all these people I was very in awe of, you know.

I wanted to be part of that thing.

It was also the home of Guy Cuevas,

a very famous Cuban DJ,

who really had the sound of the Sept.

The music was completely new,

like nothing we had ever heard before.

And there was a feeling of freedom.

Someday I would like to live like that again, just as free.

The first time I saw a Chloe show, I went to the Sept,

and we came home at probably like

seven o'clock in the morning.

We went straight on to Place du Trocadero,

where Karl was having the show,

and Guy Cuevas was there, playing music, like, you know,

when we left him the night before at the Sept.

So, it was like, you know, the Sept part two.

I remember those shows,

because I had seen Dior number one,

number two, trois, with the dresses passing like that and all that.

There, it was life, it was the street.

The energy was that it was close.

You wanted the dress because you were nearly in it.

Karl did it, and you could buy it.

It was an all over experience.

Luscious and exciting.

It was the beginning of fashion

becoming fashionable.

It was just like, "We're young, we're beautiful,

"we love fashion, we love fun."

And there's that picture of Karl having dinner

at La Coupole.

You could feel that sex was in the air also.

It was transpiring from the picture.

And Jacques was there also,

representing sex in the world of Karl.

Have you experienced absolute love, Karl?

Yes, thank goodness.

Jacques de Bascher was the devil incarnate

with the face of Garbo.

He had an elegance that was absolute.

He dressed like no one else, before everyone else.

He was the person who amused me more than anyone.

Karl was into bodybuilding.

He was very beautiful.

He would go down to the south of France,

Saint-Tropez,

and we'd put on that Bain de Soleil,

and our bodies would be just shining.

And Karl would always close himself in his room

and read like 20 books in the afternoon,

never going out with the boys

or looking for anybody or anything.

So, Jacques was part of the entourage

of the boys who came over.

And Jacques told me, "I'm in love with Karl.

"Can you help me?"

He was always dreaming about how beautiful life could be.

He was a charmer.

Jacques wanted to charm everybody.

And made you feel like you were his best friend

whenever you talked to him, whoever you were.

Jacques was my opposite.

He was also impossible, despicable.

He was perfect. And he was the cause

of an appalling amount of jealousy.

Everybody was fascinated by Jacques,

which I was not so fascinated by Jacques.

But I thought, well, maybe I'm a girl, you know,

I don't have the same point of view.

And I thought that Jacques was very manipulative.

He wanted to be the focus of Paris,

one way or another.

Fashion is a very, very small,

closed, ultra-competitive world.

The senior designers, the creative directors,

are not talking to each other, because you are in competition.

But there's a lot of crossover going on.

Our assistants are also sleeping with each other.

The court reigns supreme in Paris,

and in Paris, fashion really is hierarchical.

And there's a whole rhetoric

with signs and signifiers

that only the informed can decipher.

Paris at the time, it's like Versailles.

It's where everything happens.

Where the greatest refinement meets the greatest triviality.

And Karl is a German outsider. He has to make an impression.

To return to Princess Palatine,

this German woman arriving in Versailles,

it is very difficult for her. There are traps everywhere.

But she has immense power.

Through her wit, which is a weapon.

[IN ENGLISH] For Karl, the attractiveness of Princess Palatine

was her astute observations of the court,

and the way she could manoeuvre

through gossip, power.

I never attack anyone.

But I'm not completely defenceless.

Are you seducible?

For that, I'm perhaps a bit too "lucide."

But I've sometimes pulled the chair out from under someone

a decade later if they deserved it.

Even former friends... especially those...

Yes, I am particularly strict with old friends.

Yves Saint Laurent is one of them?

No, that's another story.

It's a lot more complicated than that.

Of course, I knew about the affair with Jacques

and Yves Saint Laurent.

But it had never anything to do with me.

I was never mad at Yves.

I had been close friends with Yves

for more than 20 years.

We used to go out all the time in the early days.

Jacques was a very provocative person,

so was what could he do that

would be more upsetting than anything?

And Karl did care a lot more

about his relationship with Jacques

than he wanted to let on.

It's only when he realised that he could lose Jacques

that he started understanding

how important Jacques was to him.

Did you live under the same roof with him?

Not very often. I am very opposed to that.

I'm always in favour of separate roofs.

Otherwise, everything becomes banal.

And especially as his nature was so different from mine.

It would have caused immediate conflict.

Physical closeness is often unpleasant for you.

Yes, I hate intimacy.

But that's probably inherited.

My mother was the same way.

She was relatively distant,

and I had to fight for her favours.

But that's better than the suffocating mothers

trying to kiss you all the time.

I would have hated that.

I wish I'd met her.

I think she would've been

probably more frightening than Gabrielle Chanel,

but with an equally, you know, quick whip wit.

Mother always told me my nostrils were too big.

That she should call a decorator to put curtains over them.

She said, "Speak faster, for the stupid things you say,

we can't take more time."

So I learned to speak very fast.

She was like a Spartan mother.

That's how Karl treated himself, too.

It was like, "You better succeed at anything you do."

[IN FRENCH] And so, this mother was the figure

of humour, cruelty...

and a certain idea of education.

[IN ENGLISH] My mother said, "It is possible to have a child with any man,

"so let's not exaggerate their importance."

Oh, my sense of Karl was that he was so fully apprised

of the dignity of women.

I do think it has something to do with that generation, though.

There was a sort of equality,

way... you know, pre-political equality.

A kind of matriarchy, actually,

that really was a functioning thing.

It's not just about feminism,

it's not about women even,

it's about a kind of liberated spirit.

Karl's vision for the Fendi woman

was a multifaceted woman.

A very strong, independent, and ironical,

and clever woman, who was approaching fashion

for her personal pleasure.

Karl worked for Fendi for 55 years.

His relationship with the five sisters

was the most energised, happy, outrageous,

challenging each other, warm family.

The Fendi sisters wanted Karl,

because they really wanted to do a revolution.

And they understood that he was a genius.

Fur, at the time,

was somebody that a man

would buy for a woman,

to have this woman like a trophy,

to show the wealth of the men.

The Fendi sisters hated that.

The motto of the company is "Nothing is Impossible."

In '77, the sisters decided to start ready-to-wear.

And so, they did this movie,

written by Karl, and directed by Jacques.

It was their first professional film, for sure.

It's very simple, you know, this girl that is a liar,

she said that she was going to Baden-Baden

to drink the waters in the spa,

but in reality, she has a lot of fun in Rome.

I think it's very Karl.

[IN FRENCH] We must draw on a certain spirit for the woman of today

and not pay homage to a past that no longer exists,

that no longer interests anyone.

Fashion is a thing of desire.

By the end of the '70s,

fashion was becoming a real business.

It was not just about creativity,

it was about selling around the world.

Karl himself was extraordinary

because he was working for so many different people.

It is a privilege to be able to live like this.

To fly like a butterfly from one country to another, one city to another,

one flower to another.

Karl Lagerfeld, you know, is big, really big, and brave,

and bold, and bright, and brash.

And Houston is too.

And so, today, we're going to give him

a thoroughly Houston, Texas welcome.

It's just sort of the peak of chic, I think.

What did you think of the airport reception?

Oh, that was the funniest thing in the world, huh?

That was really funny, and it looked divine.

I saw it on TV.

You know, I'm not the Queen of England,

I'm not really used to that.

Lagerfeld loved it, loved it.

Is this one of your favourite stores?

Definitely, I spend most of my husband's money here.

It seemed that when Karl became more recognised,

he was becoming like a business,

building a business.

He became like a royalist.

He was starting to disappear into this world of grandeur,

and it was like... almost untouchable Karl.

Did you decorate all this?

I mean, it's very 18th century, there are candles and...

You know, in a house like this, with all the panelling,

what else would look okay except 18th century, huh?

I don't like really dirty houses, huh?

That's because you have a busy life.

You need to keep it orderly.

How many lines of clothing are you working on?

I don't even know, myself.

I have lots of fashion families

and all my different businesses. I think it's very funny, huh?

They're all jealous of each other, it's very good,

and I all play them one against the other.

I think it's very amusing.

Because I think I like them all very much,

but it's very good that

they are stimulated by an idea

what they think the others are.

Because they hardly know each other.

Now, I have to ask you about Chanel,

because I'm sure everybody has asked you about Chanel.

You start officially in January '83?

Yes, exactly. Or have you already started?

No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no.

You're going to be a celebrity,

I'm sure, to a certain extent.

I don't know. But, you know,

what I really like about the thing

is doing the thing.

One business is quite powerful,

let's say Fendi is quite powerful in a way,

Chloe... but Chanel is even more powerful.

And what I'd like is the power of all of them, huh?

MARIE-LOUISE: The idea of hiring Karl came to me in '73 first.

I proposed to Chanel to hire Karl,

but, as Karl said,

"Ce n'etait pas le moment."

It was not the right time.

So, we had to wait nearly ten years.

There were a lot of legal problems

because all these contracts he had with other brands.

And so, he had to get free for Chanel

but not losing the other things.

At the time, we didn't do this kind of business revival.

And I accepted because the owners of Chanel

are people I love, and it was a challenge.

People said, "They are mad.

"They are mad, hiring that man."

And his friends said, "Don't take this old house."

At that time, Chanel was only Number 5.

99.9 percent of the turnover.

It was like a Protestant bank,

there was no creativity at all.

Chanel was dressing up very classic women,

elegant, who loved their habits,

and it was for us, Chanel,

it was our minister of health, Simone Veil,

who was always dressed in Chanel.

When Karl took over, we were all excited,

"What is he going to do?"

There, Karl,

doing Chloe,

dancing and going out at nightclubs, Le Sept, tout ca,

and taking over that old house,

with old clients, and with old women selling.

Everything was old.

It was beautifully old.

When I arrived, let's put it nicely,

the house was asleep, it was Sleeping Beauty!

Because respect and homage are not good for a couture house.

In her youth, Chanel was a very eccentric,

wild, revolutionary woman,

who had many lovers.

She is considered the woman who invented the modern woman,

battling against everybody and fighting against everybody.

That is exciting, that is fun.

But after the stupid thing she said about the knee and the miniskirt,

from then on, in the early '60s

till her death in the '70s,

she was mean, mean bitch, huh?

I have nothing against mean bitches,

being quite mean myself, that's not the problem.

But lesson-giving, and I hate people

when they give lessons.

MARIE-LOUISE: American Vogue in '83 asked Karl,

"How do you revive an old house?"

And Karl said...

Karl replied, "To revive an old house,

"you must treat her like a whore."

Well, this is Karl's way to speak, it's not mine,

but I think he is right.

You know, it was his destiny to do Chanel.

He had all that pent-up vision and desire.

MARIE-LOUISE: The first show was in January '83, in Rue Cambon,

and all Parisians and worldwide journalists

wanted to come to the show.

And the people invited were queuing in Rue Cambon

to get in, like in the biggest years

of the old Mademoiselle Chanel.

It was exciting.

It was suspense.

And the one who wanted to look like

if they were excited and they were willing,

and it was gonna be good, and the ones were thinking,

"We're gonna see what he's going to do."

MARIE-LOUISE: He launched this show with the music

of Douce France, de Charles Trenet.

And this was very, very new,

because never a sound of music at Chanel, never.

Three girls with three suits,

bleu, blanc, rouge.

I don't have to translate, bleu, blanc, rouge.

It was very moving, very... really moving.

The first show, the way he used red...

how cool.

I remember those images of Ines de la Fressange

walking and transmitting in such a powerful way

his essence, and the essence of Chanel.

The Chanel image was a lady with her hair in a bun...

Not at all modern.

But here I was, 25 years old.

He wanted to show that a 25-year-old could wear Chanel.

A very colourful tweed.

He puts a red and white checked shirt underneath.

An immediate statement that he's modernizing tweed.

Tweed had become a pejorative term.

There is a photo of Chanel with a cigarette wearing a similar dress.

The funny thing is when you see it like this, you say, "That's so Chanel."

But, no, it's so Karl.

To make fake embroidered jewellery.

A sense of humour is not Chanel.

Oh, see there, the butterfly attached to the back.

Very unlike Chanel

to do a little joke like that...

But it's so Karl.

MARIE-LOUISE: The old ladies say it's not the same,

and the young loved.

So, of course, we had criticism,

but we had a lot of success.

It was the evening dresses

that stimulated the greatest response.

By the time the traditional last dress appeared,

a stunning white wedding gown,

it was clear that Lagerfeld had scored a triumph.

C'etait genial, we knew... new life.

The concept of taking a younger designer

and putting them at an older house,

and having them re-invigorate it was an absolute new idea.

Karl was the first.

And he paved the way for what is now standard practice.

This is cute, very Chanel.

Veronica is adorable.

It's Veronique.

We got it wrong with this one...

Yes, no, that's not the best.

A bit slutty.

Yes...

It was a time when we were doing huge collections.

Two haute couture, two ready-to-wear.

We didn't stop working, it was a lot of work.

Don't we have a paler pink?

Ines was already very chic when Karl met her,

and she was a huge inspiration for our collections.

Is the Ines idea your idea?

We don't know anymore.

Maybe at the beginning. Now it's just a Chanel idea.

After the revolution, were you looking for a rather natural woman,

for a rather sophisticated house?

But... the House is not that sophisticated,

and Ines is not that natural.

She is natural in a way that is very studied.

This is the essence of art.

MARIE-LOUISE: He decided to hire an in-house model

who will be exclusive to Chanel,

so, Ines was the face of Chanel.

That was one of the big, big ideas of Karl.

For Karl, Ines was a Parisian.

Karl liked everything Ines, at that time.

The way she walked, she was taking it in front of her,

and that's what he wanted, and she was perfect for that.

She moved like she moved in the street, her allure.

She had that sort of knack.

Often, a new type of beauty will come along

that resets everything.

And I just remember thinking, "Wow, who is that?"

You kept the spirit.

What we have to keep is what people think was the spirit.

When I started doing Chanel, I said to myself,

"You have to do the same thing and the opposite."

You have to play hot and cold.

You have to both excite and infuriate

the High Priestesses of fashion.

And if Mme Chanel was turning in her grave,

it was good. It proved she wasn't dead.

The very short skirts, the wide shoulders,

the jewels too big, a bit too much of everything.

But it was time to do it. It re-established the image of Chanel.

The first few seasons of Chanel were startling.

I remember the obsession with Chanel at that time.

I mean, everyone, it was "fashion."

The 1980s was a moment of exuberance,

like the 18th century all over again,

before Marie Antoinette had her head chopped off.

You felt that, you know, it was lux, it was expensive,

it was bigger, it was better, it was, "Greed is good".

How many designs do you make?

I don't count them, thank goodness.

I read it was 6,000 designs a year.

Perhaps. But you know, I'm not the one writing those articles about me.

Maybe sometimes I can do 50 in a day,

but designing is not always a systematic process.

It's also somewhat improvisational.

It all starts with paper.

My favourite material in life is paper.

Because when I was a child, in the years after the war,

paper in Europe was not a thing you could get.

I make a very precise sketch,

with all the details, all the proportions.

And then the people who used to work with me

can read everything like you can read a page of writing.

Everything is there.

And this helps me also to do things in Rome, in New York,

in Paris, at the same time. If not, I couldn't do that.

When I was a young girl, I really always wanted to go

on the ateliers when Karl was in Rome.

It was kind of a magic trick that he was doing.

From a blank page, you would see the magic happening.

He was so fast in designing and sketching,

like he was fast with his words.

You have the idea,

but to make it happen,

you have to have an incredible workforce

with immense skill, physical effort and patience that I don't have.

I want it to be good for these people,

the ones putting all the effort in.

Because I don't spend 100 hours on a dress, I just design it.

[IN FRENCH] I was developing toiles based on Karl's sketches for 52 years

and that was nothing but pleasure.

The first toile I showed Karl

needed very little retouching.

And as a result, I stayed with him until I retired.

To not understand his sketches, really, you had to be stupid.

Every sketch was from the heart,

with a lot of inspiration.

And often from the outside, people would say to me...

"My God, I don't know how you can interpret Karl's sketches

because they seem... rushed."

But in fact, for example, when I look at this sketch, it is obvious to me.

I can really feel the shape of the dress.

I can tell from these little pencil strokes that it will be embroidered,

how the corseting works.

So I am convinced that fashion designers like Karl

are very rare, very gifted.

His premieres could absolutely interpret

the sketch perfectly.

But there were always adjustments.

The line and the proportion for Karl was everything.

He would go, "I am sorry, ladies, just a millimetre.

"Just a millimetre here.

"Look at my sketch."

And he'd always be right.

It's prettier that way, Anita.

Do you have more fittings this morning?

No, not this morning, Karl.

We did everything yesterday, too.

Yes, we did a fair amount.

Until everyone was totally exhausted.

I had plenty of people around me

who told me, "He doesn't seem too friendly, your boss, that German."

Because he was stiff, straight.

When he spoke, it was staccato.

But in reality, he was the creme de la creme of men.

I judge it that way.

Hello, Karl!

I won't kiss everyone because there are too many of you.

It'll take too long, and we have to work.

I've always had very down to earth dreams,

so it's possible to make them come true one way or another.

But, you know, the tragedy of making a dream come true is that you need another one.

A stone's throw from Rue Cambon

on the Champs Elysees,

another team is waiting for Karl's own brand, KL.

My collaboration with Karl begins with an internship.

I'm 19 years old.

After one week or ten days,

I'm asked to end this internship.

And I cannot.

I go back home,

but I'm back on Monday.

I was already in love.

I met Karl here, in New York.

My mum had always said,

"The shoes that people are wearing tell you how they are."

And so, I was looking at his shoes when I walked in,

and our eyes met because he had been

looking at my shoes.

And we started laughing.

You never know exactly what he sees in you.

What I think he saw the most

is that I was having so much fun.

This is something he was generating.

He had kind of a fluid, an electric fluid,

that was bringing you high.

We all started extremely young.

We were more as like a family.

People in my studios are like my friends,

you know, like my family.

Nobody can fire them.

It's like a closed world.

Karl was like my dad.

I never spoke about it,

because he hated people

conceiving him as a dad.

But Karl was my dad. He educated me.

Every night, we went to the bookstore.

I would say something during a fitting,

and I would say, "But, Karl, remember we saw that painting?"

So, then we would go to the bookstore,

and all of a sudden, these books would start

falling in front of me. He'd say,

"This will tell you about what you were asking.

"This will tell you about what you were asking."

He'd buy two for me, and maybe four for him,

and I was to tear out one and keep the other.

Because he believed in tearing up

and gluing and making collages.

I made collages non-stop.

Each one of Karl's studios were different.

If you were in the Lagerfeld studio,

they'd say, "Oh, those people at Chanel, oh, God."

The people at Chanel would say, "Oh, Left Bank,

"Rive Gauche people at Lagerfeld."

Jacques de Bascher was coming pretty often to the office.

As it was really this family atmosphere,

everybody was welcome to the studio.

He would sit close to Karl or close to someone else

and discuss what he was seeing.

He was often passing by also the backstage

at the time of the show.

Coming from the nightclub a bit drunk, a bit high.

He was putting a bit of a mess in the backstage.

But that was part of life with Karl.

And Karl was super happy to have Jacques around.

You have said that Jacques wanted to destroy himself.

I'm not good at that because it requires a certain talent.

I admire people who can destroy themselves.

But it was a great love.

Yes, but not in the sense that you mean.

It was more like father and son because he was much younger than me.

That's what's peculiar about the story.

I don't think there was any sexuality

between Karl and Jacques de Bascher,

and it has never been sexuality between them.

Karl was not interested by sex.

He was too much in control

and he has been educated in a strict way.

And he was not letting himself go.

Mr. Lagerfeld, be honest now.

Has there been a situation where you didn't have everything under control?

[IN FRENCH] Yes, but you learn a lot more from such situations

than the ones when you're too in control.

You occasionally need to have a situation that doesn't go as planned.

Karl got apart with Ines at the end of the '80s.

Ines was in love with Luigi,

who became her husband,

and she had less time for Karl.

And he started getting jealous of Luigi.

I read in Le Parisien Libere that Ines de la Fressange

will not be presenting Chanel's Autumn/Winter collection.

for the first time in a very long time.

Does she have the flu or is it a falling out with Karl Lagerfeld?

It is said that Ines de la Fressange is becoming

more and more influential, and that this bothers you.

Let me ask you the question.

As long as I'm around, no one takes influence away from me.

If she's here, it's thanks to me, since it was my idea.

I found that she was not in great shape lately.

She's had some personal issues and it's better she recovers.

They divorced. It was very difficult

because I was in charge with Ines' contract.

So, I had to ink the divorce.

It was like every break with Karl,

when it was with someone he loved.

It was pretty brutal.

The moment he would say, "Okay, let's finish,

"I won't see you anymore,"

he was really managing

to never cross your path anymore.

He was very... How can I say?

He didn't want to talk, he didn't want to

approach these problems.

A bit immature.

Very childish.

I think it was maybe the more fragile side of Karl.

You know, everything changes, everything.

I mean, there are very few events in a life

that cannot not change your life.

[IN FRENCH] People who think they know all about AIDS without having experienced it,

that doesn't impress me.

Because the reality was atrocious.

We started losing some friends and more friends.

Somehow it would seem that all the people

in the creative world were being attacked,

maybe more than other people.

[IN FRENCH] I had a young person in the workshop to help me make the toiles.

He was 26. Sick.

It was a massacre.

Dark time.

Now, this rumour about Jacques

and this moment of when one began to be aware

of when he was ill.

My first trip with Karl,

Jacques called to check, and he says, "Are you okay?"

And I said, "Yes, I'm fine."

I said, "But Karl's next door, you've got the wrong number."

I mean, I wasn't thinking

that Jacques de Bascher's gonna call me.

He goes, "No, no, I'm calling you.

"I just want to make sure you're okay, and how are things going?

"You just have to get into the pace of things."

Then he made a joke or something,

he goes, "Make sure he doesn't leave all those cookies

"underneath his bed," or something like that.

And I said, "What are you talking about?"

He goes, "No, no, no, sometimes

"he has bad eating habits, so, check on him."

But he did these kind of things with me,

so that was like him saying,

"You're gonna have to start traveling with him a lot."

I think there was also a sense that something's not right.

And all of a sudden, Jacques arrived at the studio,

and I just like jumped up and ran to him,

and hugged him.

And he sensed that maybe I had heard something,

and he literally just kind of like pulled back a touch,

tapped me on the shoulder, and he goes,

"Don't worry, darling, I'm fine."

And then I knew it was true.

That's kind of sad.

MARIE-LOUISE: When Jacques de Bascher was ill,

no one spoke about that.

No, no one spoke in the studio.

Karl came every day, as usual.

Did he need us to show our concern about Jacques

when he came to the studio?

The answer was no.

We were his relief

from what had happened to him all day.

When Jacques was ill,

Karl was amazing and exemplary with his friend.

Almost every night, he would go and visit him at the hospital.

He would ask us to do the fitting earlier, something that he never did.

And then at the weekend, he would take his friend to his house at Le Mee.

Karl had bought this house outside of Paris.

That house, he basically bought as a place for Jacques.

We worked a lot there.

And Karl had a different demeanour.

There was less of this...

high-octane force

that would go through the air

when you were working with him.

It was more like...

and he kept... he kept looking to the window.

He would look to Jacques's window.

Oh, we could be doing anything,

and he would look to Jacques's window,

and it was really...

from the garden.

And then he went back into the hospital,

and I never saw him again.

Have you fallen in love like that again

or was it a love above all else?

There's no question. It was incomparable.

It couldn't ever be the same, and I would never want it to be the same.

I hate the idea.

When Jacques passed away, Karl was a soldier.

He was strong enough...

...to face the fashion shows,

interviews, the fittings.

That was pretty impressive.

What's your biggest passion

outside of fashion?

Photography.

What I love about photography is that it evokes a moment

that is impossible to reproduce, gone forever.

Photography is complimentary.

It allows me to look at my own work with some distance.

It is the woman wearing clothes who gives life to them,

and her personality interests me almost as much as the fashion.

Sometimes people ask me, "Well, how does he design

"all of these different collections for different houses

"and does photography,

"and does books and exhibits and..."

So, you know what I answer? I said, "He doesn't sleep."

I was with him in Paris,

and we worked till four o'clock in the morning,

and the only reason why he stopped

at four o'clock in the morning

was because we were dead.

Yeah. You were unbelievable.

But obviously, I don't have to be in front of the camera

or I'd be beautiful like you, huh?

I can look tired and who cares? Nobody sees it, huh?

Yeah, but you still have the energy.

That's unbelievable. Yes, thank God.

That's a gift, er...

from heaven to have energy, huh?

We are in the '90s now, and I think there is real 180, or 190,

or 200-degree change in the last two, three years.

Where everything was right in the rules for the '80s, today,

who cares? Nobody cares.

I was 18 years old when Chanel first hired me.

I was wearing a rip-up jeans, and vintage t-shirts,

and I was really shy.

But I got to meet Karl, and I couldn't look at him.

I was... I looked at my shoes.

I think he just wanted to, you know, meet me,

smell the little animal that I was.

Jean-Paul Goude was to do the picture and the ad.

And Jean-Paul came into this apartment,

of the Coco apartment.

And he, er, found this.

Coco, the spirit of Chanel.

Does it annoy you, amuse you,

please you that today, models are the new Hollywood?

I was behind it in a way,

and I think it's very important for fashion.

It makes fashion much more interesting.

People watch fashion now like they used to watch movies, in a way.

On the runway, it's like the silent movie of our days.

Lots of girls, I used them before everybody,

when everybody thought they were still ugly or uninteresting.

There's an American girl called Kristen McMenamy.

Five years ago, nobody wanted her.

I thought she was genius.

Now everybody thinks she's the greatest thing, and they are right.

She is divine.

Karl Lagerfeld was the first one who said, "I like it.

"You're weird."

You know, "You are different.

"It's not bad. It's unique."

Ooh, and walking on top of it.

Karl really liked having his studio

full of different personalities, different backgrounds.

Anna Piaggi was someone who was incredibly important to all of us.

In the '60s and the '70s, that's when he began

to become very close with Anna.

This Italian woman Anna Piaggi must be quite extraordinary

to have inspired you to draw her.

It's a peculiar thing.

Anna has this gift, no matter what she does,

you want to transform her into a drawing or a painting.

She never does what is expected,

and yet once she has done it,

it is always so obvious.

What surprised me is that

I was expecting to see a 6ft tall model

whereas she isn't exceptionally beautiful.

She does not fit into any of today's beauty standards.

But she's very seductive in her own way.

She is also a very warm person.

She is the most normal woman on Earth.

Anna was a source of inspiration,

a source of bringing people together.

It's even like with the music.

Karl loved music because music connects you to the day.

In the studio, the music was incredibly loud,

and people would always say,

"How are you two understanding one another?"

If we didn't have that,

we would not have been able to work those hours we were working.

'Cause I don't take drugs, I don't drink,

he doesn't drink, he doesn't take drugs.

Anita?

Yes.

Can we try to make it a bit shorter?

[IN ENGLISH] Even Anita and the older women, huh?

They knew the music was blasting loud.

They wouldn't say, "Can you turn that down? I can't concentrate."

How do you manage to stay up to date on music?

There is this place in Paris called Champs Disques

where they get everything before anyone else, even before New York.

There was a store next to the studio,

so Karl says, "Have you heard of Champs Disques?"

"Yeah, I have." And we go, and we go downstairs,

and that's when I met Michel Gaubert.

Eric Wright came to see me at Champs Disques

and asked me if I wanted to do the music for Karl Lagerfeld,

so I said, "Okay!"

Like Karl didn't like fashion...

he always said he didn't like fashion

that was too intellectual.

He didn't want people to cry at the show,

because of all that beauty.

And also, he never wanted me to use slow music,

that he called "runway glue."

It was like a codeword between all of us

who worked on the music.

Karl would just say, "Mm, it's very beautiful.

"Runway glue."

And we knew, "Well, that's out."

In 1992, Karl wanted to do a hip-hop show.

He was starting to go back to New York.

He saw all those people like wearing Canal Street,

Chanel logos on bags and belts.

And he said, "Oh my God, they're using Chanel.

"I want to do the same thing.

"I want to, again, amplify the Chanel phenomenon."

It was them who used Chanel things

to make them look cooler

and then Chanel used their things,

and they looked cooler again when they wore their Chanel things.

So that was very fun.

That show I really liked, that became

later known as the Barbie Show.

We played that song called Short Dick Man,

"I don't want a short dick man."

♪ Don't want no short dick man ♪

♪ Don't want no short dick man ♪

The music was literally creating this story

of a Barbie doll, and just having fun.

There was this undercurrent of like

clicking on the switch for a moment

and letting something come out,

and then closing the switch.

And the music,

with the girls walking down with those zipper skirts...

that only would have come out of the wittiness

and the funniness of the studio of Chanel.

There was a review from Women's Wear Daily

that said that "The Chanel show was so much fun,

"so much joy.

"There were even songs with lyrics we can't print.

"That's why we love Paris."

It really summed up what we wanted to do.

No intellectualization of fashion or nothing,

just pure fashion with a capital F.

The designers I prefer are the designers

who do things completely opposite to what I'm doing.

MARIE-LOUISE: At the end of the '90s,

fashion start to change again.

And we have these English creators

arriving, like Galliano, McQueen.

I like other people to do good things,

and I think it's important that there are many good designers,

because the fashion world would be too boring.

For competitive people,

for people who like to be the leader,

often something like that can propel you, can push you.

All of a sudden, there's competition

when you haven't had competition.

It can make you better. It can make you strive.

It can make you go back and rethink.

It can reinvigorate you.

And I think that's what happened.

Galliano was dangerous for Karl.

Too talented at Dior.

Maybe he hired Amanda Harlech

because she was working with Galliano.

I think Amanda came to Karl

because all of a sudden when Galliano's career took off,

Amanda was not included.

And she had been very instrumental

in helping John establish his look.

And so, I think that was a perfect moment

and very smart of Karl to say, "Okay, fine,

"Amanda, come to me."

The greatest difference between working with John

was the pure speed with which Karl worked.

He didn't obsess over a piece of fabric.

He saw things grand scale immediately.

No second option.

A McQueen show was a McQueen show.

But no matter where the venue was,

somehow it remained intimate.

A Galliano show was always a Galliano show,

big, crazy, whatever you wanted.

But somehow that also remained intimate.

And we were still

into the big runway, big runway,

big runway, big runway.

And he just said, "Okay, now this has to change."

It's been 13 years already

since Karl took over the famous house at Rue Cambon.

We have seen provocative Karl, extravagant Karl.

Those days are over.

In the Ritz, he is reconnecting with Chanel spirit.

Spirit of Coco, are you there?

The story is becoming more and more important now

because of these two creative kids

that were on the block.

McQueen and Galliano,

they were always telling a story.

If you look around Gabrielle Chanel's apartment,

there's so many inspiration for Coco Chanel and for Karl.

There are so much details.

It always starts here.

You had these very famous shutters and room dividers,

the coromandels that were from China.

And Chanel was influenced by this

for her embroideries and things like this.

And Karl did quite a series that was based on this.

That was taken from a corner of the coromandel,

and just blown up, and then intricately filled.

LILY-ROSE: It always felt like there was a kind of

cosmic connection between him and Chanel.

His spirit was always in the house,

or the house's spirit was always in him.

There was a real kind of symbiotic relationship there.

Have there been moments

when you are more emotional or memories that make you feel fragile?

No, it's a cliche to believe that we think like that, no...

At one point, your body gave up.

Maybe the spirit didn't give up, but the body did, Karl.

Yes, because I was less interested in my own image.

I lived in a kind of torpor.

Karl began to gain weight a lot in the '90s.

When Jacques was gone,

Karl really began to get big.

I think the reason why Jacques would say,

"Be careful about what he eats,"

is he knew how Karl reacted to certain stressful situations.

But when Karl did have Jacques around,

there was an ease that happened to his body.

It was something like, oh...

You knew that Karl was happy.

He always pretended that he was somebody

who didn't have feelings or emotions.

You know, that he was above that.

Er, and then losing Jacques

made him realise that,

after all, contrary to what he was pretending,

feelings are the most important things in one's life.

He did sort of stumble in October of 1998.

Karl had developed a handbag

that was truly hideous.

And then his ready-to-wear collection

just seemed off the mark.

I pushed Chanel so far in one direction,

I suddenly had the feeling to clean the room out

and go back to the starting point.

But in a way, right for the middle '90s.

Most of the fashion critics wondered what was up.

It was my first show as a director general for fashion.

It was a very weird one.

It was not the best collection that Karl designed,

and minimalism is nothing about Chanel.

Karl wanted to be part of this trend,

but it was not his taste.

It was a kind of, you are a top success,

and the trend start to change,

and you feel lost,

and you don't know how to rebound.

Karl became the subject of all of these rumours

that things were falling apart,

that they were going to need to bring somebody in.

You know, after this show, it was a kind of drama

in the US fashion world.

I remember being sent to New York

to try to find some explanation, you know,

about what happened.

I think that Karl was so upset.

He was asking himself how to rebound.

Do you wake up one day and say, "I'm gonna change"?

No, I looked in the mirror.

And I saw another fashion.

You know, vanity is the healthiest thing in life

because you cannot let you go yourself.

You have to be careful. You know, if you wake up

and the pants are too tight,

it's a bad moment, huh,

for a superficial person like me.

So you lost 40 kilos. 42 kilos.

42 kilos. In how long? 13 months.

When you were losing weight, was it a battle with yourself?

[IN GERMAN] No, why always a battle? People always want drama.

I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know.

There is no discussion.

There is an order. You follow it.

[IN GERMAN] But now, I've had enough,

I need to make room for something new.

Karl was changing his house,

and he had cleared out all this stuff on the second floor.

And all of a sudden, he swishes by,

and he goes, "I'm coming, Mr. Wright, I'm sorry,

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry."

And he just went zhoomp, zhoomp,

and I said, "He's changing right now in front of our eyes."

It had to do with Karl beginning a new chapter

and adapting himself, adapting himself

to the times, not holding onto his past.

And if you held onto the past, that was your problem.

So... I presume you have heard.

It's hard to believe he is doing it.

But is it really true?

Well, it certainly looks like it, doesn't it?

Is it true?

I get a call from Karl.

he is telling me about a proposal

he has coming from H&M.

"Yes, they would like to do a collection with me."

And I have to be honest, my first reaction was like,

"Never do this."

It was completely new that a couture designer

was collaborating with a fast fashion brand.

You have to realise that this never ever happened before.

That's outrageous.

What kind of sick pleasure does he find in this?

Isn't that obvious?

I believe in two things.

Luxury that is elegant, expensive and high quality, and this...

It's something that's fun, flattering, delightful.

We were a little bit anxious.

But Chanel let him do it

because we trust him.

And... What? Don't say it.

Argh! Karl! Karl, is it true?

Of course it's true.

But it's cheap.

What a depressing word.

It's all about taste.

If you are cheap, well, nothing helps.

To get Lagerfeld at H&M prices, it's great.

Hooked... I am hooked on Karl, and all he does.

He's a genius, and I had to be here!

I never expected it to make such a splash.

The morning it started, I got a call from Caroline Lebar.

She told me that wild scenes were going on.

I'm super happy.

I had to fight for it.

We were almost crushed.

I saw one guy biting a woman for a coat.

And, really, in ten minutes, nothing left in the store,

it was a mess.

The mannequin were nude.

The fact is that from that day, his life has been changing.

I was working for a designer

who became a pop star, you know,

he was like Michael Jackson of the fashion, you know?

I'm amazed I can't cross the street

without having my picture taken.

A doll, a caricature. Every day from various people.

It's kind of phenomenal.

He loved it, he drank it up like gallons of Coca Light,

it was like champagne to his very existence.

[IN FRENCH] It's as if I were my own puppet.

I am playing with a character.

Some performers have an alter-ego,

and so much of what was Karl's look was artifice.

It was the white hair, it was the glasses,

it was the high neck collar.

It was 18th century caricature.

I mean, imagine if you saw Karl in a t-shirt.

You know, what would that have been?

It's an armour, it's a persona that you play.

And it was part of what made Karl so iconic.

He had this endless box of tricks

and naughtiness, and provocation.

I'm DJ Karl. This is my radio station.

One of his project was Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto is an amazing game,

a bit controversial, like Karl.

Liberty City, home of the bourgeois squander.

Live fast, burn out,

move to the suburbs, you see?

You know you're listening to the studio,

but what you don't know is that

you are focused too much on the past.

Saying things were better in the old days.

They were not!

For someone working in PR

for such a personality with no limit,

there were some times, some critical moments.

Sometime I told him, "You know,

"there was this moment where you said this and this."

Maybe it will be tomorrow in the newspaper.

Most of the time, I did not realise

how big it would become.

I mean, I cannot say that

everything he said was correct. We all know that.

And if he would have asked me,

"Oh, what do you think about that?"

And I would probably have said,

"I don't think that's funny.

"You don't have to say those things."

Women in the past were restricted by what they wore,

whereas today, women perhaps are not restricted

by what they wear, but they're enslaved in a way

by the fashion industry's insistence

on women being thin.

Yes, but I see it as like a normal evolution, you see?

You mean it'll be okay for women to be fat in the future?

I'm afraid, yes.

Chanel didn't have to comment

on his personal statements.

That is all I have to say.

Today, we do a show, not only for the audience,

we do it for the whole world.

It's something people watch.

I do a kind of Cecil B. DeMille job for Chanel.

Like a super production movie.

It's not a bad thing.

Karl, when he was a child,

had visited a great exhibition

at the Grand Palais in Paris.

He never forgot the beauty of the bizarre architecture.

And I think he knew that it would become

a source of inspiration at the right scale

for Chanel and for him.

When it reopened, he jumped on the Grand Palais,

and it was the beginning of this amazing story

between Chanel and the Grand Palais.

I have a fantastic team.

For instance, the shows we do for Chanel with these incredible sets.

There's a guy named Stefan Lubrina

who's a genius at realizing my ideas.

I have ideas, but there is no way I could actually make them.

He often said to me, "Listen, Stefan, I dreamed of a set last night.

"Come, we have to meet up."

He was always trying to go further.

The sets were evolving more and more.

Everything was possible inside the Grand Palais.

And for sure, we did everything there.

Last Year at Marienbad, it's a key movie

in the story of Chanel.

Gabrielle Chanel created the costumes.

And it was the show of the comeback

of Ines de la Fressange.

And it was so striking, so moving.

I remember walking in

and we were standing

underneath the first two tiers of the Eiffel Tower.

And everyone was in shock.

He was a little bit like a magician in that way.

He just made us all four years old.

It just felt like we were inside a part of Karl's brain

that had just kind of birthed this insane thing.

The later collections at the Grand Palais

could be perceived as eclipsing fashion

and therefore, were newsworthy

in just their enormity.

Lift off.

But really, Karl was reading what was coming up ahead.

He was so amused that the demonstration show

coincided with demonstrations in Paris.

Karl's strange psychic genius

that great designers have

is to really interpret what is about to happen.

When he said, "Uh, next show, we do supermarket,"

oh, my God, supermarket, I was like...

even I told all my team,

"What I can do with a supermarket?

"What I can do with supermarket?"

So, I was so stressed.

We have to make a Chanel story.

Chanel is like very kind of...

all the rich people wearing the jackets.

So, we had to make expensive jacket

from the supermarket idea.

So, we went to all the supermarket,

I take all the picture of the vegetable, everything.

And these are like beautiful betteraves colours,

and this onion colours.

I never thought about this,

the onion can have a beautiful Bordeaux colours, you know.

We made also this kind of frozen kind of carrot colours.

Salad colours...

kind of a red meat tweed.

And then this one is from egg, so you see.

We made this one Chanel bag,

it's quite an education.

It'll fit in the bag.

Everything you could exist in a supermarket

was like branded by Chanel.

And they made the supermarket like a Walmart,

something not very glamorous, which I also liked.

It looked like, oh, my God, super discount.

Karl came to see the set at the Grand Palais.

We had made posters: 30% off.

And suddenly he stops.

And he says, "There's no way.

"We're Chanel, we don't do sales.

"It has to be plus 30%."

So we changed all the posters the day before the show to plus 30%.

I've still got the picture of Karl

when he first inspected the set.

And he just stood there, a bit like a lost child.

Sort of picking an apple out of a pile of apples.

And then looked at me, and he said,

"I've never been in a supermarket."

The pleasure of shopping

is a cultural activity of our days.

I loved the supermarket collection.

So clever and so smart. And funny.

Were you thinking and realizing that, you know,

because we're so into Instagram

and like the whole generation,

it's very Instagram ready, isn't it?

I think it's already all over the place.

But that's why I do it, you know.

MARIE-LOUISE: A commercial for Chanel,

directed by Ridley Scott or Baz Luhrmann

costs millions to produce.

But Karl, with his shows...

gets a much better result with all the social media today.

And it's extraordinary. Karl is known all over the world.

And this is something that really...

Karl invented for Chanel.

Because after that, all designers followed his footsteps.

Everyone has copied Chanel. Absolutely everyone.

Departure to Rue Cambon,

Chanel Lines flight number 19 at Gate K.

He made Chanel what it is today,

so attractive to the whole world.

Cuba, it was magical.

And then, at night, we all danced.

Well, Karl was amazing, amazing dancer!

Just so onto the rhythm.

And it was the first time also,

because maybe it's the first time

that he was holding me like this,

that I felt Karl as the man.

You know?

Like there was something about...

the sensuality.

He was, like, constantly wearing those big, smoky glasses,

you could rarely see his eyes.

And I loved when he took off those glasses,

each time was like , it's like...

falling in love, you know?

The man had this look in his eyes.

I have to be careful. I'm being watched.

And his eyes was like the look in the eyes

that you can find in, like, kids,

they're four or five years old, where it's still pure,

nothing has been damaged.

Maybe that's why he kept his glasses, you know,

because he didn't want to maybe look

so sensitive or vulnerable.

Karl and I developed this trust.

He became more closer to me when my mother died.

He was talking more about his private life.

And he start now

to be more open to talk with me, you know?

The relationship between Karl and Sebastien

was very tender, but they fought like a bad marriage.

Karl would mutter to me in the car, you know,

"Sebastien's in a bad mood.

"He left his phone on the roof of the car, and it smashed.

"And his world had ended."

But equally, Sebastien gave all his time up.

It was 24/7 with Karl.

We were like family, but we were not family.

But we were family.

If he was my father, at one point,

I would have said, like, "Go fuck yourself, sorry.

"You know, you're too much now."

But you cannot say that when he's not your father.

But you do everything like he was.

I never wanted children.

Why? Firstly because I'm irresponsible.

And the stupid thing about children

is that they can make grandparents out of you.

And I have no desire for that. I belong to no generation.

And that is the secret of the whole story.

I am generationally liberated.

Never in my life did I think I would have a Choupette.

But you must admit that she's irresistible.

LILY-ROSE: He started calling me Choupette,

and it was really sweet.

We bonded a lot over our cats.

Choupette represented the softness in him, you know,

represented his affectionate, kind of very lovable,

very childlike side.

Choupette was his alter ego.

It was him.

He would express love through Choupette,

pretending that she was loving you

but in reality, it was him.

Choupette is a very beautiful cat.

And I think she really became this spiritual friend.

She was like the spirit of Karl's mother,

of everybody who protected and loved Karl.

So that that, particularly

when he'd been diagnosed with cancer,

must have been a huge solace to him.

The illness of Karl's start like in 2015.

Like basic problem of the start of the shit, you know.

Maybe if he decide to go to have this surgery on himself,

and to take off the prostate,

maybe he will be still alive today.

But at this moment, he decide to do the other way.

He didn't want to people knows that he have this problem.

He didn't want to lose times,

about collection and things like this.

He didn't want to stop.

The machine was going on for the... on the front.

You know, the train was like keep going, you know.

That's what Karl wants.

Paris-Hamburg show was the profound show.

That was Karl coming home.

He also knew that he wasn't going home.

I think he knew that

things weren't going right health-wise.

[IN FRENCH] Germany is my spiritual homeland.

We were in the countryside.

So I was really isolated, but in a good way,

deep in the forest where happily nothing happened.

He always told me that they were living

in the north of Germany,

and they were not very touched by war.

And I think he made a special legend about it

because he want himself to forget

about all those crazy, horrible things happened there.

In the summer of 1943,

The English and the Allied forces planned Operation Gomorrah,

the destruction of the city of Hamburg.

45,000 people will die.

And so you have to imagine Karl Lagerfeld. He is ten years old.

And even if he is 40 kilometres away, protecting him from the bombs,

he would have seen the fires.

And he would have seen the hundreds of thousands of civilians

trying to escape this Operation Gomorrah.

And...

he will never talk about it...

but he must have been deeply affected.

And this child will find books in which he discovers the world of Versailles.

And this child is going to project himself into this imaginary world

to escape the horror that was happening all around him.

And this will stay with him for the rest of his life.

The symphonic of Hamburg

was a new building by Herzog & de Meuron

which was quite stunning.

It was the new pride of Hamburg.

And for the music, we had an orchestra.

There was this track called La Paloma,

which is a song that Karl adored.

That's what the wives of the sailors would listen to in Hamburg

when their husbands went away.

When, during the rehearsal, Karl asked me,

"Can the musicians do it again?"

And like, we'd listen to it like five, six times in a row.

He twisted it.

There was an atmosphere that wasn't Karl...

the Karl we knew...

or the Karl... he showed us.

But it was Karl.

It was... the materials were thicker.

There was something very, very emotional.

'Cause he doesn't like the past.

So, to go back there meant something also.

There was something very elegiac about it.

The line of those coats.

Even the shoe,

which has a narrow, narrow toe box,

it's just so elegant.

That collection was unbelievably comfortable.

You know, those jerseys are my favourite jerseys.

And those trousers, it just felt really practical.

So, it did feel like a return collection

and a sort of essentials.

Like a capsule for a journey.

Maybe he became closer to his mother, finally.

He spoke about how much he had to leave Hamburg,

and how his mother encouraged him.

How he'd...

watched the boats

sailing down the River Elbe

and out into the infinity of the world

with all its potential.

[IN FRENCH] Without her, I wouldn't be here to begin with.

It seemed hard and difficult at times,

but in the end, she was always right.

He knew he was ill.

But it was suddenly this way he was looking at me.

And we'd leave the studio,

and we'd be in the lift, Sebastien, Karl, and I,

and Karl had really kept it together.

He must have been in great pain.

That in itself sluiced with a great fear,

the work keeping him going like a sort of lifeline.

But then in the lift, going down to get to the car,

he almost slumped against the wall of the lift,

the metal wall.

He just didn't... not wearing his glasses,

like sort of everything coming apart,

like buttons, jacket,

so unlike the Karl we know where everything is strictly,

you know, the line, the discipline.

And he would be looking at me,

looking at me...

as if he was looking at me

from very, very far away,

and he was leaving.

[IN FRENCH] I don't want to be seen when I'm dead. I find it awful.

Cover me up and throw me in the trash. Done, over.

I find that the ultimate indiscretion to look at dead people

while they lie there defenceless, the poor people.

Spring/Summer 2019,

his last haute couture collection.

The scene was like ideal villa,

in the south of France,

with this beautiful garden

in the 18th century.

It was a vision of what he loved the most.

At Versailles, Madame Pompadour ordered porcelain flowers.

They were in the gardens of Versailles during wintertime.

And some dresses were inspired by these porcelain flowers.

Karl was really passionate about those ceramic flowers

because... they wouldn't die.

I mean, they were here in the winter.

It was incredible when we arrived at this show.

There was a lot of snow in Paris.

It had snowed heavily the day before.

And when we arrived from outside,

in this warm garden with its palm trees and cypresses,

all that was missing was the crickets.

An incredible contrast.

I was trying to put Karl in the show.

I said, "Karl, let's go. We have to go.

"We have to go. It's not good not to go."

Because I know, for everyone,

if he was not at the show, that was the end.

Because Karl never happened in his life

to miss a show.

There was a moment,

a moment of great emotion because...

we didn't see Karl come out at the end.

MARIE-LOUISE: I saw him after that show.

I saw him, I remember very well speaking with him.

And his favourite speaking with me

was about Princess Palatine.

He loved to speak to me about Princess Palatine.

Karl was like a falcon in a gyre.

He just rose on this thermal of his own creativity

from decade to decade to decade

until what was left, heaven.

I have no regrets.

Remorse perhaps, but not any regrets.

You know that quote, "I have been everything,

"loved everything, tasted everything,

"and now I am an icy star."

♪ This is the number one song in heaven ♪

♪ Written, of course, by the mightiest hand ♪

♪ All of the angels are sheep in the fold of their master ♪

♪ They always follow the master and his plan ♪

♪ This is the number one song in heaven ♪

♪ Why are you hearing it now, you ask ♪

♪ Maybe you're closer to here than you imagine ♪

♪ Maybe you're closer to here than you care to be ♪

LILY-ROSE: He was a designer for the modern woman, you know,

or for the modern person.

Whatever modern meant at that time.

His spirit is completely alive everywhere.

That's my favourite thing, is to be sitting next to him

and hearing him telling me all the worst gossips

about everybody around.

He gave me loads of books, which I didn't read, okay?

Where we connected was on Rilke,

not that he said you could ever understand it

in anything except for German.

Virginia Woolf, definitely. Absolutely.

Emily Dickinson, a lot. Don't ask me to quote any.

If he said, "Oh, I read this incredible book,

"have you read it?" And I said no,

he wouldn't exactly go,

"[CLICKS TONGUE] Oh."

But he almost did,

and you felt like, "Damn, I'm letting him down,

"I can't have that conversation."

But then the next time you saw him,

you would say, "I've read it."

And he'd say, "Right, let's talk about it."

And we did.

And he loved it when you thought differently.

What Karl has given to the future generations of design

is so enormous.

By setting up 19M with Bruno Pavlosky,

which houses the artisanal skills

which were really endangered.

I mean, literally couldn't pay the rent,

they have flourished to the point where

the ateliers are full of young embroiderers,

pleaters, featherers.

I love that building.

I went there and I took my daughter

to see how everyone is, like, working by hand.

Because my grandmother taught me how to knit,

how to sew, and I'm teaching my daughter.

I would love to spend a week there learning.

♪ It's number one, all over heaven ♪

♪ It's number one, all over heaven ♪