Karl Lagerfeld

4. Karl Lagerfeld

Born in Hamburg in 1938, Karl Lagerfeld emigrated to Paris at the age of 14. He was to go on to become one of the most celebrated designers this century has seen.In 1955, at the age of just 17, Lagerfeld was awarded a position at Pierre Balmain, after winning a competition sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat (the coat he had designed for the contest was later put into production by Balmain). In 1958, he left to take up a job with Jean Patou, which gave him an invaluable knowledge of couture but apparently very little pleasure. After just one year, he quit to work as a freelance designer for such fashion houses as Krizia, Charles Jourdan and Valentino. By 1964, he had grown so disillusioned with the world of haute couture that he left Paris altogether to study art in Italy.In 1967, Lagerfeld returned to fashion, joining Fendi as a design consultant. In the Seventies, however, his name was more closely associated with the house of Chloe, where he was given carte blanche to produce exquisite floaty and feminine ready-to-wear collections which claimed to rival contemporary couture. His 1972 Deco collection, which consisted of black and white prints and clever bias-cutting, brought him worldwide acclaim. He produced his last collection for Chloe - now designed by Phoebe Philo - in 1983 to move to Chanel (though he did return briefly in 1993, to replace outgoing designer Martine Sitbon).At the same time as taking on the title of director of collections and ready-to-wear at Chanel, Lagerfeld launched his own-name label, now synonymous with strong tailoring, combining easy-to-wear cardigan jackets in his favourite bright colours and softly shaped knitwear to create what he describes as "intellectual sexiness". Meanwhile his designs for the super-chic French fashion house, a fusion of pre-war Chanel and contemporary trends, carried the label to the pinnacle of high fashion in the Eighties and Nineties. Notable moments of his career at Chanel include teaming the traditional box jacket with denim mini skirts in 1991, combining club-influenced black fishnet bodystockings with the traditional Chanel camellia placed cheekily over the breasts and matching hefty lace-up boots with flowing georgette skirts and leather jackets. By 1997, Vogue had crowned him the "unparalleled interpreter of the mood of the moment".Despite moving from label to label, Lagerfeld has managed to retain a sense of his own style throughout his career. His success lies in an ability to make a bold statement and he is never afraid to try something new. He has also maintained a sense of humour throughout his designing that has produced such legendary pieces as a shower-dress, with beaded water streaming down the front; a car-dress with a radiator grille and fender, and a multitude of outstandingly eccentric hats, from armchairs to cream cakes, translating Chanel trademarks such as the quilted handbag into a range of seasonal must-haves, including the handbag earring, the handbag hat, the doll-sized shoulder bag, the quilted hip bag, the quilted Alice band and the outsize baguette bag.He also enjoys a range of outside interests, including languages (he speaks fluent German, English, French and Italian and has expressed a desire to learn Spanish), illustration, antiques and photography (he was responsible for producing Visionaire 23: The Emperor's New Clothes, a series of nude portraits, starring South African model David Miller) and describes himself as an "intelligent opportunistic" and "professional dilettante". As he told US Vogue in 1988: "What I enjoy about the job is the job." Vogue,01.2001.

5. Taking his shot

It's a sunny Halloween afternoon in Ames, Iowa, where former pro-basketball player and U.S. senator Bill Bradley is scheduled to make his fourth campaign stop of the day. The candidate's plane has arrived about ten minutes ahead of the press plane, so that by the time we disembark, Bradley has-positioned himself in front of the tiny Ames airport, his H six-foot-five-inch frame sprawled across a green plastic chair, ubiquitous grape soda on the ground beside him. His head is thrown back, his eyes are closed; the candidate is catching some rays. As we hit the tarmac, he looks up. "Welcome to Ames," he says, deadpan, giving us a wave before he closes his eyes again. Finally, after everybody else is loaded in the vans, ready for a walking tour of a couple of Ames blocks, he climbs in. "I got him up," says his "body man" Matt Henshon, "by telling him he would still be out in the sun."

"Senator Offbeat"—that's what the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater called him. Cool, seemingly laconic, Bradley's doing his own thing out there on the campaign trail, coming off as refreshingly straightforward or just a little weird, depending on whom you're talking to. Earlier that day, he'd told CBS's Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation that he "drew the line" where religion was concerned; it just wasn't something he was going to talk about. Schieffer was left to ask him simply whether or not he believed in God. "Yes." "Can you tell us any more about it than that?" "No."

Later, when he arrives at the house of a supporter, 60 people are gathered in the backyard, but first the host, a nice man named Jay, asks Bradley if he'd like some cider or a soft drink, or maybe even some beer before he addresses the crowd. Bradley looks at him. "You got any whiskey?" This is the point at which Matt steps in to reassure us all that the senator was making a joke, but Bradley's not quite finished. Standing on the man's backyard deck, he notices that part of the lawn has been roped off. "You know,-when I got here today, Jay promised me that each and every one of you would vote for me." Pause. "I'm only kidding. The only commitment Jay made today is that he would save his best grass."

Normal flesh-pressing it ain't. It is, rather, an approach that sometimes gets him labeled diffident, aloof, anti-charismatic. But it seems to be working. When Bradley threw his hat in the ring a year ago, most pundits—and supporters of Vice President Al Gore—dismissed the announcement as the insignificant and self-indulgent act of a once-oversung hero of the Democratic Party. He had, after all, waffled when he'd had better shots, in 1988 and 1992. Now he seemed to be setting himself up as the automatically unsuccessful and tedious spoiler in a race in which all the other possible contenders had had the good sense to realize they could never make it against the well-financed sitting vice president.

That, of course, was before he raised as much money as the vice president and began leading him not just in New Hampshire but in New York; before he put Gore on the defensive, prompting him to change everything from his clothes to the address of his headquarters. That was before respected political journalists like the Washington Post's David Broder began writing columns with headlines like script for an upset, and the Gore campaign team's disarray was repeatedly – almost luridly – displayed on the front page of The New York Times. His endorsements include those from Senators Bob Kerrey and Daniel-Patrick: Moynihan, Wall Street heavy hitters Lou Susman, managing director of Salomon Smith Barney, and Thomas Labrecque, retired chairman of Chase-Manhattan' Bank, and Lakers-coach and former Knicks teammate Phil Jackson. (“Why did he take the job with the Los Angeles Lakers? It was not-because he thinks the Lakers can be champions – it is because it’s apart of my Southern California strategy. Make no mistake about that."- Barry Diller gave him a fund-raiser in L.A.; fans as disparate as designer Tommy Hilfiger and investment tycoon Herbert Alien round up checks for him in New York. He is running a big-league campaign in every way—except stylistically. So the question now is, Will the style sell?

Bradley doesn't just want to be president; he says he wants to change the way presidential campaigns are waged. In the beginning, he conducted whatamounted to a floating seminar – introducing himself to small -groups of voters: probing, pushing, _finding out what their daily - concerns were, begging for their "stories." He was, he said, putting together a "narrative," a word not often the mainstay of a stump speech. Meanwhile," he steered clear of what he cafe "contrived" settings and exchanges. In a race in which we know, for example, that George W. Bush reads the Bible every day, Bradley will not discuss religion. In a race in which we knew that Mr. Popper's Penguins was Al Gore's favorite childhood book, Bradley has-declined to "go down the road" of the favorite book. ("What if I said Crime and Punishment! People might say I identified with a killer;") After Bush flunked a reporter's pop quiz on foreign leaders, the same reporter sprang a similar quiz on Bradley, and he simply refused to play.

It is something he does often. At the first Democratic town meeting in Concord, New Hampshire, Gore's staff distributed five press releases in 38 minutes, correcting Bradley, touting Gore. Bradley barely bothered to dispute Gore's estimate of what Bradley's own health-care package would cost. After Bradley's performance that night, Bob Woodward said he communicated a "presidential, almost Olympian calm." But Bradley is a bred competitor (former Boston Celtic John Havlicek says he still has his old opponent's handprints on his backside); it is more than calm he's demonstrating—it's an act of will. "It requires some discipline, yes," Bradley tells me one afternoon in Davenport, Iowa, scraping soup out of a plastic container. "You always can resort to the elbows, but you make a judgment about what the politics of our time needs and what you can offer. You wanna win, but you wanna win in a certain way."

He is, he says in almost every speech, trying to "respect people" by running a "positive campaign." That he is trying to save his "outrage for those things that I want to change," and his ‘ingenuity to try and figure out, how do we get everybody to see that we’ve got to head in the same direction?’’Vogue,12.1999.

I’m in the wig room. For those of you who don’t have one, it is a small room where footmen powdered your, or more likely your husband's, wig. The house was built in 1588", so there are many such nooks and crannies, just perfect for me, the spy. So many young mothers are spies. They have to be, watching their child covertly, for clues, for signals, for some way to comprehend what is going on in that secret new bundle of nerve ends, tender flesh, brains, and biology that we almost inadvertently create over a long nine months.

I’m in the wig room, putting away linen. It might be a charming image – a young matron, keys at her waist – but in fact I'm in a froth of rage about the whole business of being a mother. What I want back is what I was, as archetypal mother/writer Sylvia Plath put it, “before the bed, before the knife, before the brooch and the salve fixed me in this parenthesis.”

I have three babies at this time, and I love them. At first they were adorable, noisy blobs; now, somehow, worryingly, they are fast growing into people with wills of steel, and there are times – and this is one of them – when I want not to be a mother ever again. For a start, I didn’t realize that they were going to be there forever. I thought in my innocence that you could, as it were, dip into babies, and I remember once at the very beginning driving into Bath and realizing as I parked that I had a tiny baby and she was sleeping in an empty house some 20 miles away. I had work to do. Writing. And she wouldn't let me.

The wig room is off the nursery, which has a big old window seat, like in Jane Eyre, and Rose and Daisy, two of my three daughters, are sitting there. I know this not because I have seen them, but because they have come in together, talking, intimate, and something about their tone, the urgency of their words, has made me freeze. Rose is six; Daisy is five. I know in my mind's eye how they look on the seat, blonde heads soldered together, their earnest, beautiful faces turned to each other, two philosophers with fat little lips.

I am famished by love of my daughters. How did this happen? Motherhood had always been an uninviting prospect to me. I'd had enough of the receiving end. The word mother carried a message I didn't want to hear-or repeat. Trammeled lives, little cruelties, a turntable of defeating busyness, and no joy in sight. I watched my own mother to make sure I would not become like her, though I was sure there was a dark angel ahead waiting to drop her image over me like a second skin turning me into the Mother. It seemed to me there was no way of escaping the destiny of repetition. So, easy answer, I would not become one.

And yet here I was, a mother of three stacking up fine linen and feeling a wedge being driven into my heart so that I could almost feel it creaking apart. I didn't know at the time that these wedges are necessary to widen the heart up, since it has either to widen or to break. I was in a rage because I wanted to have my life of such a short time before back, back to when I was a free woman, an adventurous spirit, an editor at Vogue and a protegee of Diana Vreeland – back when a heart was a Chanel motif, to be worn on the sleeve, a bauble outlined in diamonds.

I first met Vreeland in 1964, when I was nineteen and working as features editor at Vogue in London. The offices were open-plan, with partitions and bookcases at shoulder height, and so I first saw her as this extraordinary apparition, gliding along above the level of the filing cabinets. Then she swung round the corner between the cabinets and stood there burnished and shining in front of me like an Aztec goddess, with that unique stance that Cecil Beaton has famously described: “the Vreeland medieval slouch, pelvis thrust forward to an astonishing degree and the torso above it sloping backwards at a 45-degree angle.” Enormous stretched red canyon of a mouth; high, red cheeks; black-on-black lacquered hair; edge and cut and glitter; slanting eyes that missed nothing, nothing to do with the body, and as I came to know, missed many a thing to do with the soul. She came to a standstill in front of me, her retinue behind juddering to a stop. Her eyes swooped about, editing what she was seeing into what she wanted it to look like. I sat transfixed.

I'd joined Vogue only a short time before, and my first article, about the playwright John Osborne, had just been published. His seminal play, Look Back in Anger, had changed British theater at one blow. He'd become an icon, worshiped and loathed in equal measure. So when I wrote to ask for an interview, I didn't have much hope that he'd give one. It never occurred that I could actually have access to one of my great heroes. I'd as soon see Shelley plain or say hello to-Balzac. But I got a sweet note back suggesting we meet for lunch; we talked all afternoon. And then, ten a cable came into the office that I have still pinned to my heart. It simply said, “Osborne/Devlin text superb.$500 for first American rights. D.V.” In my lingo, D. V. meant Deo volonte, “God willing.” Something we were taught in convent school always to use when speaking or writing of the future, presumably to preempt presumption. That first, enabling cable was from Diana Vreeland, and I loved her for it.

My stock rose within the London office, since American Vogue rarely lifted pieces from other magazines in the Conde Nast family. I was puffed up with pride, but the pride was as nothing compared with the prospect of $500 for those mysterious first American rights. Five hundred dollars then was the equivalent of six months’ salary, but it was much more than that to me. It was a recognition that could write, that my writing was worth something, that people would pay to read it. And now here was the reality of “God willing” in front of me, talking nineteen the dozen and offering me a job at American Vogue.

I'd read Vogue avidly since I was a young girl in a remote part of Ireland, 1eading such an atavistic life that turning those glossy pages was like accessing an archive from the future.

The past hung around Ireland like a shroud, and Vogue was gleaming and shining and soaring. The world of Vogue was so brightly lit - everything was illuminated, the shine on a string of pearls, the gleam on the curve of a cheek, the sheen on a satin ball dress. At home, shine was the sun on the lake, the reflection of brass harness on a horse's neck, the gleam of leaves in the chestnut tree. In Vogue, there were articles on cars as fashion accessories. At home, there were only two cars in the district, the priest's jalopy and ours. The world of Vogue sparkled night and day—flashlights, footlights, headlights. At home at night, the silence was palpable, the darkness profound.

The world of Vogue under Diana Vreeland, as I came to know it, was all invention, eclecticism, and style. The world I had come from knew nothing of invention; everything was old, organic, decaying—a place I think she'd have been amazed to know still existed, a culture on the brink of extinction, the ragged ends of a dispensation that had lasted for centuries. The world of the horse and cart, of silence and lapping water, dark colors that didn't show the dirt, religion and madness. Trapped in this Irish world, I had entered the Vogue talent contest and won it, which was how I had landed on the staff a year later.

Diana Vreeland showed me how to reinvent myself, though I'm sure nothing could have been further from her mind: She wasn't interested in me personally - indeed, I don't think I ever met anyone less interested in the person behind the persona. She loved surface, and I learned from her the great art of invention; that to be inventive with your life is creative; that invention has nothing to do with truth or lies but is a means of escape, a means to change places, to break a pattern. She taught me such a valuable lesson that I didn't know its worth until much later in life: that to dream, to reach out, to be unashamed of how you are, never mind who you are, to aim for the unreachable, is essential, that there is no such thing as ordinary.

But of course one of the things that made her extraordinary was that she never tried to be fantastical or larger than life. It was all-natural to her, if the word natural could ever have been used-with-in her aura. She said, “I figure that if I like something, the rest of the world will like it, too. I think I have an absolutely solid ordinary point of view.” True eccentrics do think that. They think they are perfectly normal. Perfect, yes. Normal, no.-She possessed all kinds of arcane knowledge, yet she never went to the person behind the image. She didn't want to; she didn't want to be disturbed. I was always amazed when I remembered she was a mother and a wife and heard that she adored her children.

I am silent in the small room. I hear Daisy ask Rose, her elder sister by a year, therefore an oracle and Delphic in her pronouncements: “Rose; what would you do if you had a mother like mine?”' I carefully, carefully close the old door and try not to rustle with laughter, with love, with the understanding that I have heard a profound question. I have hearer for the first time the word mother used in connection with me, as a definition of myself. For all my laughter, I understand that I have also heard on of life's great truths; that every child in the same family has indeed a different mother. I know I am an irreconcilably different character to each of my three, and that this brings problems. I know, too, that whatever else happened to me in that journey – short in time but infinite in compass – between me on the; eighteenth" floor of the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue and me here in the nursery, I have broken the motherhood! pattern laid down for me. Or at least broken it down enough to have given Daisy the power to think she could “do” something about me. In that earlier dispensation, adults, parents were monolithically immutable – children were powerless. That went without saying. You suffered in silence or in sobs. Yet here was Daisy talking with a hint of brisk killer instinct that warned me I'd better change my ways. And my ways, it transpired, was the amount of time I still devoted to writing for Vogue. Because although I'd left, I still did work for it, and this necessitated my leaving home. I wondered how Diana Vreeland had dealt with the perennial problem. I didn't know then her history, or her history as she told it, of a mother who, she surmised, died at 55 because she could find nothing more to interest her. “She was quite young and beautiful and amusing and mondaine and splashy,” Diana Vreeland said, “all of which I'm glad I had in my background – now. But I've had to live a long time to come to that conclusion.” Diana Vreeland was magic. She sometimes called it fantaisie, sometimes called it faking it – “the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.” But if you believed in her, it rubbed off on you. I never quite believed in her, but I recognized my luck in working for her, though she was daunting. Not that I exactly did work for her, since I was in the features department, a separate world, a kind of unnecessary adjunct to fashion. I was poised between the two departments – no, I wasn't, I was never poised in my life, I was on a hamster wheel between them – and I had lunch with Diana Vreeland when she wanted me to do something for her side of the dunes.

For someone who had lately arrived from a world where the rule of thumb for decoration was “kitchens is brown and landings is buff,” Diana Vreeland's office was a visual education. A big black-lacquer desk, a leopard-skin carpet, leopard-skin upholstery, and scarlet walls covered in images she had culled, including the notice EVERYONE LOVES A LORD. The floor was awash with spreads for the next issue. Here was a woman who had a map of her desk so that everything on it would always be exactly in the same place. At lunch, I would try to order something I could eat unobtrusively, and she'd tell me what she wanted. No, she wouldn't. She'd emote, and I'd try to guess.

“They wa-a-a-de deep into the Thames,” she said without preamble, “and turn them up. The turners-up are dressed in a certain costume, a livery. They stamp their bottoms—and my God that causes quite a flurry. I believe they all are in-the queen's gift.”

The sandwich between my teeth became intractable. I tried for clues. I said, “Boats?”

“Well, I don't think they use boats,” she-said. “I think they use a – not exactly a hook – a crosier.”

It must be bishops, I thought. Bishops are appointed by the queen. And they do have lovely costumes and pink frocks. But having their bottoms stamped…? Does she mean “smacked”? In the Thames? Some kind of baptism? Total immersion?

“Bishops?” I ventured. “An article on bishops?”

“That's a good idea,” she said. “That wonderful pink. You can only get it in a little shop in the Vatican City where they sell the cardinals' silk stockings. But we need to get the Swan Upping article first.” Swan Upping turned out to take place once a year on the Thames at Maidenhead, when liveried men did indeed “turn lip” the swans and mark them as possession of the queen. Vreeland commissioned Snowdon to take the Swan Upping photographs and saw all this and more as the cutting edge of fashion.

I worked for her for two years. Then, suddenly, I was married and soon after, from having a future that belonged only to me I became irrevocably linked to three solipsistic baby beauties who had no idea that I existed outside of their needs. From an apartment on Eighty-eighth Street next door to the Guggenheim, I found myself in deepest Gloucestershire with a husband and three babies without practice or training. They had no practice, and I had no training. They grew up in a flash that still dazzles my perceptions and illuminates my life. I remember I devised a fairly simple method of memorizing particular moments. I would look hard at three blonde heads over a book – or a four-year-old Rose in yellow sou'wester and little else running through the rain, Bay in a tutu that didn't fit, Daisy solemn in a lilac negligee – and register the mental snapshot. I have only to close my eyes, and those images are there, my lost children, running away from me. I know those children. I know all about them.

Where are they? Well, Daisy is working for Vogue, forging her own future, living the circle that binds us together in its lovely and ratifying spin. I believe in magic. We all have extraordinary powers, if only we could access them. One way of accessing them is to be happy. One sign of the magic of happiness is how things connect, of how you do one thing that seems arbitrary at the time and then turns out to be the first and most necessary step in a process that leads to fulfillment. So much is circular. Vogue lay in my past, I thought, but it was streaming through my future, and that child who was pondering the vexed question of what to do about me was already connected to Vogue.

I see Daisy now and yet continually also see her as she has been through all the stages of her life. I see her different ages, different sizes, image superimposed on image, growing up in an endless shadow play, always herself in all her different manifestations, one melding into the other, a magma, an archaeological dig that only I can turn up. And yet she could always escape me. The child who asked what could yon do with a mother like me saw that I was a spy and took her own measures. She silently slipped away, withdrew from the tempestuous encounters endemic to the rest of the family.

Do you know that poem by Seamus Heaney about the hare?

Choose one set of tracks and track a hare

Until the prints stop just like that in snow.

End of the line. Smooth drifts, where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course and then took a spring

Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

Daisy was like that; all the evidence of her was there. Room like an ice palace, possessions in place. But the impeccable girl had sprung. I think about her all the time. Does she remember what it was like to cry passionately over a sad story, to mourn a dead bird, to lie awake dreaming of hunting with her pony?

What goes around comes around. I remember showing a beautiful-limned big-eyed silent young girl with hair like a polished blade around the Vogue offices in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue. Her name was Anna Wintour. She is now Daisy's editor. I doubt if she would remember. But the fact that the circles are so clean and fitting is a sign of hope to me, a sign that we are all linked, that the magic that is coincidence and synchronicity works, that the world is not an arbitrary place.

I recently came across an article Daisy had written for a newspaper. She hadn’t bothered to tell me. In it, she wrote, “I wonder at our shared blood. I pore over photographs of her, not just at the way she looks, but to try to gain some sense of her. It still mystifies me that she bore me, that we are of the same ilk.” I am glad I am no longer the oracle or the know-nothing, neither the solution nor the problem, neither the dispenser of justice nor the very opposite. Where once I went ahead, and they followed, I now follow in their footsteps, an old page to their young Saint Wenceslas. I have all the time in the world and all the space I need. And at some level, I want to be back in the wig room to see them on the window seat discussing what to do about the most important person in their world. I telephone to ask her how she is, She’s in her new office, in Times Square. I am looking out at a fox stalking across a field. There's no one at the magazine who remembers me. Except her. My daughter, who works at Vogue. Vogue, 12.2000

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