Karl Lagerfeld Profiles

Karl Lagerfeld is a German creative director, artist and photographer who was based in Paris — the head creative director of the fashion house Chanel as well as of the Italian house Fendi and his own eponymous fashion label. Over the decades he collaborated on a variety of fashion and art projects, and he was recognized around the world for his white hair, black sunglasses and high starched collars. This profiles page tells the career in order: the Hamburg childhood and the 1954 prize, the Patou and Chloé years, the Fendi partnership of 1965, and the Chanel revival of 1983 that made him fashion's defining figure. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

The biography searches in the references gather the wider career coverage, and the designer's official website is linked there as well. The collections, runway and news pages in this series file the fashion work the life produced.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

Hamburg, the Prize and the Patou Years

Karl Otto Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg on September 10, 1933, and moved to Paris as a young man determined on fashion. In 1954 he won the coat category of the International Wool Secretariat competition — the same competition in which the young Yves Saint Laurent won the dress category — and was taken on as an apprentice at Balmain. In 1958 he became artistic director of Jean Patou, designing ten couture collections there before leaving in 1963 to work independently.

The independent decades made him the industry's most employable hand: he designed for Chloé, where his romantic printed dresses defined a 1970s register, and from 1965 for Fendi in Rome, where his partnership with the Fendi sisters — and the double-F logo he created — lasted the rest of his life. Photography grew alongside the design work until he was shooting his own houses' campaigns.

1983: Chanel, and Three Houses at Once

In 1983 he accepted the job the industry considered impossible: creative direction of Chanel, then regarded as a perfume with a fashion past. His method was the opposite of reverence — he inflated the interlocking C's, shortened the tweed suit, mixed the house codes with leather, denim and street styling, and produced collections at a pace that turned Chanel back into Paris's pace-setter. His own label followed in 1984. For more than three decades he directed Chanel and Fendi simultaneously while running his own house — an output no contemporary attempted, let alone sustained.

He died in Paris on February 19, 2019, still in post at both houses; his final Chanel collection was shown days later to an audience in mourning. Read with the collections page, the profile completes its arc: the apprentice of 1954 who became, by longevity, range and sheer production, the central designer of his half-century.

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