Lagerfeld: I am not an intellectual

He glides in looking relaxed, wearing a black suit jacket by Tom Ford, black jeans by Christian Dior, a 4in-high Edwardian collar, and fingerless biker gloves adorned with rings. He offers a gloved hand and a well-practised apology, and takes a seat at a large wooden table in a room attached to the main studio, surrounded by sleek filing cabinets, yet more books and stacks of hip fashion and design magazines.

“I’m mad for books,” he says, sitting motionless behind his black Dior shades. “It is a disease I won’t recover from. They are the tragedy of my life. I want to learn about everything. I want to know everything, but I’m not an intellectual, and I don’t like their company. I’m the most superficial man on Earth.”

Lagerfeld relishes such contradictory language – or should I say, he relishes talking rubbish, probably because it makes understanding him more difficult and shields his private life. “There are many Karls,” says the publicist Caroline Lebar, who has known him for 22 years. “He is like – how do you say in English – the animal that changes its skin?” A snake? “No, a snake changes only once in life.” A chameleon? “Oui, oui. Karl is like a chameleon. Always changing.”

. . .

Discussion about “the hidden depths”, as he calls them, should be avoided. “The quest to find yourself is an overrated thing concerning not very interesting people very often. Psychoanalysis – I don’t want to hear about it. Before Freud, people weren’t tortured by these things that have undermined the territory of perception. You have to live with your shortcomings.”

I’m just trying to get behind the many faces of Karl, I suggest. He laughs.

“This reminds me of when Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vanity Fair. I didn’t know her very well then, and she said, ‘I have to spend three days with you to see what’s behind.’ And I said, ‘Annie, you’re wasting your time. Look at what you see.’ ” He casts his hand theatrically over his face. “There is nothing else.” Why do you want to be known as superficial? “I like that image. I don’t want to look like an old teacher.

from the Times

A whole hour with Karl Lagerfeld

Trading up from Pete Doherty

No drug habit, apart from formaldehyde

Largerfeld in London

Kaiser Karl held a dinner at Nobu in London last night to celebrate his 25 years with Chanel, and his first ever London catwalk show. He was interviewed on the news last night, and I rather thought the old pot belly was reforming itself over the ribs.


Here he is with Kylie

The talons of death clutch at the arm of the living

And here's a suit from the show

Grouse shooting at Balmoral outfit

Short news round-up

(think we'd forgotten?)

Lisa Armstrong in the Times today has an interview with Karl Lagerfeld

Predictably, he likes the notion of despot, indeed, has fostered it, adopting a uniform of white shirt (he has more than 1,000, mostly from Hilditch & Key), drainpipe trousers, frock coat, white ponytail, omnipresent sunglasses and a carapace of rings (he has hundreds) that garland his knuckles like armour. What he dislikes about going to Germany, which he does as rarely as he visits Britain, is the Teutonic habit of calling him Karli, or Karlchen. Anyone would think he preferred his more common nickname of Kaiser Karl.

The Kaiser persona is so recognisable that it has become a Hallowe’en staple in New York; recently Roberto Cavalli attended a party in Lagerfeld fancy dress. “An act of courage, no?” retorts Lagerfeld. “His silhouette is a little . . . just say I think I look better.” Since his dramatic weight loss seven years ago (he says that he keeps in shape by foxtrotting with Oscar de la Renta), The Look can border on the demonic or, on milder days, on the vestments of a malevolent Dickensian priest – “defrocked” as he puts it with relish.

Also in the Times, is a piece on the 30 things every woman must have in their wardrobe

I have 20 of those items, lacking, among other things, a crisp white shirt, a blazer and kirby grips. But I do have a cocktail ring, in fact I have two.

What do these three men have in common?

A few years ago, I was having lunch at Moro in Clerkenwell Market with the then women's page editor of the Guardian. Sitting at the next table were a group of adoring acolytes hanging on the every word of a flat bloke with a blonde bristly head like a pig, dressed in combats encasing thighs which oozed like over-ripe Camembert sluggishly running off the edge of his chair.

That, said my lunch companion, is Alexander McQueen.

And a spasm of pure rage passed through me. Who was this fat bastard to tell women that they were obese if they couldn't fit into a size 10? To make clothes that half the population couldn't wear? I am tired of fat men telling non-skeletal women that they don't exist. Granted, McQueen, like Lagerfeld, with the assistance of the finest trainers money can buy and no obligation to prepare family meals three times a day, have slimmed down, or in the case of Lagerfeld, turned himself into his own corpse, but fashion is full of fat men (sorry Alber, I really love you in every other way) giving normal-sized women an inferiority complex.

I had my picture take a couple of weeks ago to go with a magazine piece I'm doing . There was a photographer, a picture editor, a make-up artist and the manager of Hobbs all involved in this operation, and after the make-up artist had bemoaned that she couldn't find a pair of trousers to fit her in Zara, the photographer said that one her friends was a plus-sized model. 'What's plus size?' I asked. It's size 12 (US8) she told me.

Myself, I'd put every man in fashion who weighs over 150 pounds on the Atkins diet. And don't come back until you can fit into skinny jeans.