The second episode of the Disney+ original series “Karl Lagerfeld” sees the designer meeting the legendary Marlene Dietrich at her Paris apartment. It’s the early 1970s, and the Karl Lagerfeld of then is not quite the one we know and mythologize now. Dietrich, too, is not quite herself; she had aged and her health had declined after surviving cervical cancer in the ’60s and a stage fall in 1973.
Lagerfeld, played with aplomb by a nuanced Daniel Brühl, had just been named artistic director of Chloé after years toiling behind the scenes. He was working on a collection, and when he dangles the possibility of dressing Dietrich, prematurely as it turns out, Paris editor Francine Crescent offers a portfolio in the magazine in hopes of photographing the actress. Lagerfeld takes his pitch to a skeptical Dietrich—she does not want to be portrayed as a caricature of her younger self, nor a preemptively memorialized figure—and it prompts one of Lagerfeld’s most revealing moments in the series, perhaps the most important to deciphering his psyche.
Fuelled by his desire to persuade her to help him, Lagerfeld tells Dietrich, “I don’t have this body, I don’t have this stature. I’m not 35. It’s what I show the world because it’s what the world wants of me.” An earlier scene depicts Lagerfeld wearing a girdle under his suits and heeled boots with inserts to make him taller. He knows what this moment could mean for his career, and she does too. He tells her that he will present her as she has been, powerful, “with panache.” That he won’t allow her to “wear her misery.” This exchange defines “Karl Lagerfeld” as a story of undeterred and audacious self-invention, a tale of a man who made a deliberate, meticulous choice at every crossing in his life.
The story implies that he chooses to be behind the scenes at first because of his insecurity. He chooses to step into the spotlight because of his need to compete against and outdo his once close friend Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, and admitted enemy, Pierre Bergé. The show, in fact, paints Saint Laurent as a godlike figure, first on the cover of a magazine and then at one of his fashion shows. In some moments, it almost feels like “Karl Lagerfeld” is the story of Saint Laurent (more on that later). In contrast, Lagerfeld is first seen through the eyes of his eventual life companion Jacques de Bascher at a club. He is a “promising young designer,” but not a “household name.” An underdog.
When De Bascher visits a magazine stand to ask for an issue, any issue, featuring Lagerfeld after that first sighting, the clerk says she’s never heard of him. Portrayed by Théodore Pellerin with scene-stealing verve, de Bascher is employed throughout the series as a tool to introduce Lagerfeld’s world to the viewer. He learns of the key characters in Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent’s cliques and in the fashion scene—illustrator Antonio Lopez, Paloma Picasso, Anne-Marie Muñoz, editors Crescent and Anna Piaggi. He is the recipient of a variety of key one-liners that explain Lagerfeld’s world. My favorite, and the most telling, is when Lagerfeld tells De Bascher that fashion is “not about women, but about men,” gay men specifically, who are competing to “define the moment.” Whoever has the best collection and dresses the key customers, defines the zeitgeist and thereby society. This thought explains, too, why the women in the series—all fascinating and with spectacular lives worthy of biopics of their own—are always relegated to pawns in the story.
“A couturier is a mirror of the woman he dresses,” Dietrich tells Lagerfeld, castigating him after disliking the dress he makes for her. Dietrich is implemented as a mirror for Lagerfeld, as is his mother Elisabeth, who in a way takes the shape of his inner voice. “They’re shaming you,” she tells him when he receives an invitation to Saint Laurent’s runway show. “Go show them,” she tells him the last time they speak, at least according to the show. It’s the pinnacle of a lifetime of reproach disguised as encouragement. It is in this push and pull between the external stoic, confident, and forceful Karl Lagerfeld and the privately vulnerable, tender, insecure man that becomes a compelling portrait of self-invention. This is both an inspiring and painful reminder of what it takes to become the person you want to be. Of what it means to always choose yourself, or the self you want to become, and what that choice entails every single time. This, in my experience and opinion, is one of the most crucial and unsung of queer traditions. Queer people have a beautiful legacy of building our own selves in the face of a world at odds with our existence. That is the heart of the story of Karl Lagerfeld as told by this emotional yet kind and overall flattering portrayal of the fashion iconoclast.
“Karl Lagerfeld” is also a fabulous lesson in fashion history. It shows you the wedding of Paloma Picasso, the creation of the Chambre Syndicale by Pierre Bergé in 1973, which united ready-to-wear designers and couturiers, and the rise of Thierry Mugler and the next generation of designers, who Lagerfeld supported. The show also charts Lagerfeld’s clever career moves, from meetings with the Fendi sisters to his relationship with Chloé’s Gaby Aghion. Yet all of this comes second to his relationship with de Bascher. This is the chink in the armor of “Karl Lagerfeld.” Telling the story of the designer’s relationship with de Bascher certainly gives what might be a familiar tale a fresh spin. But by focusing so much on their relationship, it’s almost as if the series becomes about him—and Saint Laurent and their catastrophic relationship—rather than about Lagerfeld. The feeling is that the story of Lagerfeld, whose relationship with de Bascher was said to be platonic and asexual, was not considered by the filmmakers to be impactful enough without sex.
I am not prudish, and certainly do not shy away from speaking about the nuances of the gay and queer sexual experience. I consider sex crucial to the history of gay and queer liberation, to the history of queer art and the development of queer spaces. Still it frustrates me that, when it comes to characters like Saint Laurent and, by extension, Lagerfeld, Hollywood cannot seem to tell their stories without fixating on their sex lives. Should we shy away from including these storylines in their biographies? Certainly not. But when gay sex is satirized, dramatized, and utilized for shock value of mainstream and heteronormative audiences, the end result feels undermined. Such was the case with other biopics of designers from the same time.
“Karl Lagerfeld” is a compelling biopic, but it’s also a fashion document. And to a fault, the fashion Lagerfeld was making, and the way in which he “shaped the zeitgeist,” gets short-changed by its insistence on telling a love story that might’ve been integral to his life but not to his work, nor, to be honest, to his becoming. In the end, Dietrich guest edits an issue of Paris (December 1974) but she does so without Lagerfeld’s involvement. She didn’t like the dress he made for her. After watching all six episodes, I couldn’t tell you what it looked like. But in a story about one of the world’s most celebrated designers, shouldn’t fashion be the main event?
