Given their recent 200 layoffs in Paris and the cancellation of their Mobile Art Tour, talks have been all about Chanel these past few days. BBC had the chance to sit down with German design master and Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld in the old Chanel Studio. He tells the reporter, “I do everything…I have a very special way of working – I’m quite a good sketcher so I see a thing, I make a sketch, the people who are used to work with me they can exactly work nearly without questions after that, from the sketch. I see fittings and I change very little because: I put something on the paper, I think about it. I am not a second option person. It is that or nothing. If it is not the way I see it I prefer not to see it. It’s a very bossy way perhaps, but it works like this. It became a huge business like this so for me it’s OK. I do everything. I do the collections, I do the advertising, I do the windows, the concepts. I do the sets of the show – if not, I’m not interested.”
When it came to talks about the economic climate – which clearly have effected the luxury fashion house – Lagerfeld was surprinsingly optimistic remarking that he sees the whole downward movement as a cleaning up adding that “it was too rotten anyway – so it had to be cleaned up…I see it like a healthy thing – horrible but healthy, like some miracle treatment of the world.”
The designer continues by defending extravagant purchases by saying “I can be interested in a $20m diamond I will never buy, without desiring the diamond. If you want only things you can afford, it’s boring too. It’s great to see things you may not buy – because you don’t have the money – but it is very ugly to think they shouldn’t exist because you can not buy them.”
Whether you agree or disagree with Lagerfeld’s comments, his strong opinions are signature Lagerfeld and sure to stir up some interesting conversations.
Images courtesy of the Fashion Spot forums.
