Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel fashion icon, dies at 85
Fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld has died at the age of 85, the Chanel fashion house of Paris confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday.
The long-time creative director of the French fashion house, Lagerfeld was admitted to the American Hospital of Paris on Monday, according to local media reports. Lagerfeld did not appear at the end of Chanel’s show at Paris Fashion Week in January, sparking concerns about his health.
Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg, Germany. He moved to Paris at age 14, where he worked at fashion brands including Chloe, Fendi, and eventually Chanel, earning a reputation as the “unparalleled interpreter of the mood of the moment,” according to Vogue magazine.
Lagerfeld described himself as a “European,” hailing the interwar Germany he never knew as a “spiritual homeland” that was destroyed under Nazism.
Lagerfeld’s young years
Karl Otto Lagerfeld was born in the 1933 in the northern port city Hamburg, the son of a rich industrialist in the food sector.
He lived through the Allied bombings that devastated the city towards the end of World War II, but also learned French and English from a very young age.
“I was brought up as a European, I spoke three languages at age six: English, French and German,” he told Gala magazine’s German edition in 2014.
After seeing a Dior fashion show in a Hamburg hotel in the early 1950s, young Lagerfeld decided to become a fashion designer and set off for Paris with his mother’s words — “there’s nothing to do here, Germany is a dead country” — ringing in his ears.
From then on his life would become focused on France, Italy and the United States.
Fashion icon
Chanel paid tribute to the creative force behind its iconic designs in a statement released Tuesday that credited him for having “reinvented the brand’s codes created by (founder) Gabrielle Chanel.”
The fashion house’s CEO, Alain Wertheimer, said: “Thanks to his creative genius, generosity and exceptional intuition, Karl Lagerfeld was ahead of his time, which widely contributed to the House
of CHANEL’s success throughout the world. Today, not only have I lost a friend, but we have all lost an
extraordinary creative mind to whom I gave carte blanche in the early 1980s to reinvent the brand.”
Leave a Reply