One of Lagerfeld's Chanel
Store passions is German posters. He's seen here holding a 1913 Doyen
cigarette post by Paul Scheurich, with pieces by Walter Schnackenberg behind
him.Karl Lagerfeld is famously a man of many parts: a Hamburg-born fashion icon
whose vision of modernity is still revitalizing the legendary French house of
Chanel after 25 years, an art photographer whose recent pictures of the Chateau
de Versailles’s park in winter evoke almost human emotions from the stone
statuary and an instinctive connoisseur who has outfitted a plethora of homes in
such spots as Hamburg, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, Rome and Paris with the finest
examples of “things I like,” including 18th-century French furniture, Old Master
paintings and Art Deco and Memphis design items Chanel 2013 .
Lagerfeld’s deftness with decor has made him an avant-garde trendsetter with a
wide following. His influence is reflected in the prices his collections command
when sold at auction, often fetching two or three times the estimates.One of
Lagerfeld’s latest projects is the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, a traveling
contemporary-art show that he conceived as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the
Chanel handbag and whose exhibition space he commissioned the Pritzker
Prize–winning architect Zaha Hadid to design. For the pavilion’s first stops, in
Hong Kong and Tokyo, French curator Fabrice Bousteau chose original
installations inspired by the emblematic purse and created by 20 contemporary
artists, including Nobuyoshi Araki, from Japan; Blue Noses, from Russia; Daniel
Buren and Sophie Calle, from France; Subodh Gupta, from India; and David
Levinthal, from the United States. On October 20, the show swoops into New
York’s Central Park, where it will remain until November 9. Next year it will
travel to London and Moscow, finishing up in Paris in 2010.Jean Bond Rafferty
caught up with Lagerfeld in the Chanel
Price studio on Paris’s Rue Cambon. He was putting the final touches on the
2008–09 couture collection but took the time to reveal the raison d’être of the
Lagerfeld lifestyle.
You are working at a Jean Prouvé desk. We are sitting on Prouvé chairs.? When
did you discover his designs?You know, I bought Prouvé 20 years ago, when nobody
wanted him. These were made for a school. I also have a set of 40 chairs and 10
tables from his first known public work, for the Crédit Lyonnais bank. I bought
them for nearly nothing from a very good dealer, Anne Sophie Duval, who
unfortunately just died. Now people ask me for a chair, and I give them as
gifts. Are you always way ahead of the curve?The biggest, most beautiful classic
paintings—by Impressionists, by Surrealists (whom I hate), by Expressionists
(whom I have) and even modern art, like Pollock—were not expensive when they
were made. Now you buy them for a fortune, and you have only a few excuses, or
no excuse [for waiting]: You didn’t have the money to buy even cheaply 30 years
ago, or you are an idiot and you are blind.chanel
handbags usa Or you like the idea of putting something on the wall and
everybody knows how much you paid for it. It’s up to you to adjust to the
period. You can fight for the past, or like me, you can be a healthy opportunist
and go to the next step. You move on quickly.I hope so. I’m a fashion person. I
change clothes, furniture, houses, collections. Life is about change. There is a
moment when things cannot become any better; then you change. There is no
feeling of home in my house. I don’t have those feelings. I am utterly free,
European, free-minded, and I have no sense of possession. But to have no sense
of possession is easier if you have owned a lot. You keep nothing when you sell
these things?I keep things like a joke, the furniture of my childhood home.
That’s your Rosebud, à la Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane?In a way. I’ve kept the
pieces, but I don’t use them. They are too tiny for me Chanel Bags
2012 . It’s a very beautiful set of Biedermeier furniture—the desk where I
learned how to write and how to sketch, even the paintings my mother put there
that weren’t good enough for her, the leftovers, the German Romantic paintings.
How do you live with your art?I had beautiful Old Master paintings; I sold them
all. But now I have a collection—it’s not on the wall—that I really love, of
German posters from 1905 to 1915. They are the beginning of modern advertising,
like huge Pop-art paintings, with unbelievable colors and modernity. They show
the strangest products: AEG electrical equipment, coal, chocolate, sometimes
fairs, or exhibitions. But they are divine, and they are impossible to find.
Where do you find them?I get all the catalogues, and I have people who buy for
me. The other day, one of them said, “You cannot pay $50,000 for a poster chanel 2012 .” I
bought it for nearly $80,000, and a week after, at a sale in New York, a poster
by the same artist—not as good—went for $120,000. But you don’t hang them on the
wall.I want to put them in my place in New York. They don’t work in France; it’s
not a French style at all.? I will do the New York apartment in the style of the
[Deutscher] Werkbund, the architectural movement that had designers like Bruno
Paul, Hermann Muthesius and Peter Behrens, who taught Walter Gropius and Le
Corbusier. They did modern things differently, in 1910, before the Bauhaus. I
have a collection of furniture bought 20 years ago that is stunning, very
colorful, in bright red, yellow, green and gold. Suddenly people are discovering
Werkbund. Everyone knows Vienna Secession, but there is not much left. Werkbund
is Germany for me, a Germany that I can identify with. Why did you choose these
things for chanel
usa New York?My apartment is in Gramercy Park. I like it because it’s very
German and very New York at the same time—the New York of E. B. White. Your
current enthusiasm is contemporary design, the work of people like Marc Newson
and Zaha Hadid.I have known them for years. I bought the first piece of
furniture Zaha ever made, for Sawaya & Moroni—a sofa 5.5 meters long—20
years ago in Milan. If you ask me what genius is, I would say Zaha Hadid. You
started collecting Marc Newson at the Galerie Kreo, in Paris.Most of the
furniture in my Quai Voltaire apartment is from the well-made limited editions
of the artists of Kreo: Marc, the Bouroullec brothers (Erwan and Ronan) and
Martin Szekely. Everything Martin does is great.
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