For better or worse, there is maybe one person more quotable than Kanye West on this earth and his name is Karl Lagerfeld. The man who designs for three companies—Fendi, Chanel and his own Karl Lagerfeld line—is a mad man in more ways than one. Dude is on one, at all times. For example, there's the classic story about a Fendi assistant with a complicated last name who Lagerfeld took it upon himself to rename from Peugnet to Leroux. You may know this man today as the upscale thot dress designer of Hervé Leger.
Lagerfeld recently announced that Fendi, the company he's been with for 50 years, would add a fur-centric collection to his already long list of designs, so The New York Times took a minute to talk to him, of course. And what would a Lagerfeld interview be without references to his famous cat and a few megalomaniacal statements about how he'd prefer to never discuss fashion with men? He dished on everything from selfies to his sense of humor. The best bits are below for your viewing pleasure.
He hates anniversaries:
"No, no, no, no. This is one of the sicknesses of our period, to look back. No, forget about it. Fashion is now and tomorrow. Who cares about the past? But at Fendi, they like to tour the past."
He doesn't even like looking back at his own work:
"As long as you’re in the business, you must not think about your own work. In Germany, they made a huge exhibition of everything I did, Fendi, Chanel, Lagerfeld, Chloé and all that. I’m not even going to the show. I don’t care. ... There’s no history. I don’t even have archives, myself. I keep nothing. What I like is to do — not the fact that I did. It doesn’t excite me at all. When people start to think that what they did in the past is perhaps even better than what they do now, they should stop. Lots of my colleagues, they have archives, they look at their dresses like they were Rembrandts! Please, forget about it."
He doesn't believe designers are "artists":
"I don’t think that most of the designers have a very quick sense of humor. They take themselves very seriously because they want to be taken as artists. I think we are artisans. It’s an applied art. There’s nothing bad about that. If you want to do art, then show it in a gallery. ... I’m a designer, I do photos, I do books, I’m a publisher, but I don’t have the self-proclaimed label “artist.” I hate that. Very pretentious. If other people say it, it’s very flattering, but if you start to say it yourself, you better forget about it."
He is so famous, he can't walk the streets without being stopped for selfies, which he also hates:
"I don’t do selfies. But other people do, and they all want to do selfies with me. No, no, no. Thank God, Sébastien, my assistant, he’s mean to the people in the street, mean and rude. I’m a nice person."
He is going to stop designing when he dies:
No. I would die on the spot. Chanel died in the middle of a collection when she was in her nearly 90s. I have time!
