LONDON — On February 19, 2019, I was sitting in a cafe around the corner from BoF's old offices on Great Titchfield Street with our chief technology officer, Walter Badillo, when I received a text message. Karl Lagerfeld — the designer who had become a global symbol of the fashion industry — had died.
I was surprised by the sadness and grief that washed over me. Tears came to my eyes as I started to think back to all the times I had seen Karl over the years. We met so many times before and after his Chanel and Fendi shows I had lost count, but perhaps our most memorable encounter was our first: back in February 2011, when I was suddenly given the opportunity to interview him — with only 10 minutes notice.
I was at Suzy Menkes' International Herald Tribune conference in London. BoF was only three years old. I was walking the halls of the InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane after Suzy had just done a very rare live public interview with Karl on stage when someone from The Luxury Channel pulled me aside and asked me if I'd like to ask Karl Lagerfeld a few questions for their video series. I couldn't believe it! I said yes and then quickly realised I had no idea what to ask him. (I ended up asking him about Facebook, but that is a whole other story.)
Now, as speculation mounts over who will become Chanel's next creative director, I have been thinking back to what made Karl such an exceptional success. On stage with Suzy, Karl shared his thoughts on Coco Chanel, and where she went wrong, and how he was able to revitalise Chanel, making it one of the most desirable luxury brands in the world.
Karl understood that the brand's roots in the rigorous world of Haute Couture were essential to its future, but he also knew it was time for a shake-up. "When I took Chanel over, everybody said to me, 'Don't touch it, it's dead," he told Suzy. "In a way, she had made two mistakes in the end of her career. When the 60′s started — and there was certainly this movement of youth — she wanted to give lessons of elegance, so she decided miniskirts were horrible. Number two, she started to say blue jeans are horrible. You know, that was the fashion of the world of that moment. Nobody wanted to be told by an old lady that mini-skirts and jeans are not chic. The result was, she lost her power, and in the end nobody cared."
Karl frequently quoted Goethe when explaining his strategy for Chanel: "Make a better future with the expanded elements of the past." This was also captured in one of his now iconic illustrations from 1991, which I referred to a lot when I first started working in the luxury sector.
After taking over at Chanel in 1983, Karl managed to revitalise the house by unearthing and reanimating its codes, turning them into powerful signifiers of what would become a global fashion cult. This approach has now become part of the standard luxury playbook, but nobody has since done it better than Karl at Chanel, in part because the brand had such a rich lexicon for him to work with: there was the camellia flower, the quilted bag, the tweed suit, the bi-colour patent shoe and of course the interlocking C's logo.
Today, Chanel is at another critical moment.
Although some critics (and even some customers) did not appreciate Lagerfeld's ready-to-wear designs for Chanel, there's no doubt that he catapulted the brand into the cultural consciousness, with his savvy society connections, and ability to read the zeitgeist. That hasn't been the case since his death. And Chanel is a weaker brand as a result. That doesn't mean Chanel hasn't been part of the conversation. It has, but not for the right reasons, from online critique of its recent runway shows to reports of diminished manufacturing quality.
What does this mean for Chanel's next designer?
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