The eternal life of Karl Lagerfeld, the insolent genius who only obeyed one order: "Be neither a priest nor a dancer!"

Karl Lagerfeld in the sixties, dressed as a 'Proustian' dandy. Cordon Press

When Karl Lagerfeld (1933- 2019) left his native Hamburg to move to Paris at the age of 20, his parents only asked him one thing: "Don't you ever become a dancer or a priest!"

However, Otto Lagerfeld, venerable condensed milk magnate and absent father, and Elisabeth Bahlman, cultured woman and implacable mother, did not know how to foresee that the fate of their offspring, although far from the church and the cabarets, would be halfway between these two occupations.

For more than half a century Lagerfeld was the closest thing to a religious figure in the field of fashion, a hieratic legend, imposing and at the same time endowed with an undeniable talent for

.

That in 2007 he attacked with such (legal) fury the journalist Alicia Drake for narrating his eternal rivalry with Yves Saint Laurent (and for revealing his true age) in the highly entertaining essay

illustrates that, in addition, the kaiser of fashion suspected that one day his biography would be narrative material of the first order.

Intuition, of course, was not lacking.

In early October, Jared Leto announced the launch of a

of the German designer.

The American will play Lagerfeld because, as he himself has said, he received his authorization in life, and he will produce it with the help of several of his closest collaborators: it will be a kind of authorized audiovisual biography that will join the highly suggestive unauthorized ones that they already populate the bookstores.

In Spain, the Superflua publishing house has just published the translation of

, by Marie Ottavi, a monumental investigation that reconstructs the life and work of the designer through testimonies, quotes and his own interviews with the protagonist.

Karl Lagerfeld in one of the last Chanel shows he attended in life.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY (AFP)

Ottavi knows the subject inside out because, before this, he published a biography of Jacques de Bascher, the ill-fated and excessive dandy who turned Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent's lives upside down in the stormy 1970s.

Lagerfeld, who cared for him until he died of complications from HIV in 1989, had always refused to talk about this story, in a secrecy gesture that, for his exegetes, was as eloquent as the sunglasses that hid his gaze. and the rings that covered his hands.

This detail is not an exaggeration: his fixation on the rings came from a day when, watching him smoke, his mother told him that the gesture of holding the cigarette drew attention to his hands, which were not "very beautiful".

"You can already imagine the effect that that has on a 14-year-old boy," Lagerfeld declared in 1992.

Psychological issues aside, Lagerfeld's career allows us to explain the fashion of the second half of the 20th century, from Haute Couture to

, just as Coco Chanel's biography illustrates the former.

Perhaps that is why the Met will dedicate its fashion exhibition to him in 2023. Lagerfeld was an obsessive and immensely practical worker who knew how to see that the battle of fashion was not only played out in memorable creations (like those of Chanel, Dior or his rival Saint Laurent), but also in the evocation of a certain atmosphere that, for the layman, was equivalent to fashion itself.

Hence, since his death, biographies and books of aphorisms and anecdotes have multiplied, the fascination of which did not go unnoticed by Karl himself, who in life agreed to star in several documentaries and even publish a book with the recipes of his diet. of slimming.

The fact that the German officially did not like biographies does not prevent him from devoting himself with relish to providing his biographers with the juiciest raw material that exists.

As he used to repeat, he was interested, above all, in the future.

Inside of the labyrinth

Before embarking on 'Karl' (Superfl ua) Marie Ottavi wrote 'Jacques de Bascher, dandy de l'ombre' (2017), the semblance of a man about whom there was hardly anything written.

“On Karl Lagerfeld, however, tons of information circulated,” she notes in the foreword.

"He spoke freely to all kinds of media, even to fanzines sewn with three threads, without ever revealing the truth."

For this reason, Ottavi's book is more kaleidoscopic and polyphonic than those of Raphaelle Bacqué (also French) or Alfons Kaiser (German).

In it, the 'Libération' journalist confronts sources so as not to leave out any story.

The result is 600 pages divided into scenes that read almost like reports.

Or, as she would have liked Lagerfeld, like stories.

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