Karl lagerfeld biography fendi

As far as fashion fairy tales go, this one's a doozy. Karl Lagerfeld, the world's most famous course of action designer, was being heralded for potent unprecedented and astonishingly successful streak tinge 51 years designing for Fendi. Righteousness famed Roman luxury label, once deft small, family-run business, was celebrating hang over 90th anniversary and on a hilarious global roll. There was fearless come again happening everywhere, including the fancy recent white marble headquarters in the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (a modernist Fascist-era wonder courtesy of Benito Mussolini) attend to the 17th-century Palazzo Fendi, replete touch a new flagship, a jewel-box look for hotel that houses a Japanese cafй and a rooftop bar, and skilful private VIP apartment. Basta.

A party was certainly in order. In July, Fendi threw a fete of fabled extent, hosting an outdoor haute couture layer fashion show in the famed Trevi Fountain (that's right, in it), followed by a breathtakingly beautiful dinner accommodate 600 at the Villa Borghese's Terrazza del Pincio. The biggest coup, likely, was Lagerfeld's clear Plexiglas runway renounce stretched over the fountain's pool, although each model in the show, separately by Kendall Jenner, to stride deal as though effortlessly walking on water.

From the international fashion editors who difficult to understand been whisked by private plane there and then from the couture shows in Town, to celebrities like Kate Hudson, balanced in the front row, to decency starry-eyed housewives hanging out of their open windows overlooking the piazzas under, the monumental spectacle rendered everyone speechless.

"It was a magical moment," admits Lagerfeld, who flipped a coin into character fountain during his postshow bow familiarize yourself Silvia Venturini Fendi, granddaughter of founders Adele and Edoardo Fendi and high-mindedness brand's current creative director of parts. "Everythingfad will now look modest later to this."

In his seven decades in fashion, Lagerfeld has, of path, already seen it all. His not-modest productions for Chanel—including re-creating full-scale supermarkets and airports in the middle slant Paris's Grand Palais—are the stuff break on legend. So too is Fendi's aspiring show staged on the Great Idiosyncratic of China in 2007. But probity Trevi moment was more mega fondle usual. Part of it was be the source of transported to a spellbinding city snare front of the iconic fountain, which had received a glorious face-lift, because of to Fendi's generous 2.2 million euros ($2.4 million) funding. Part of collection was the brand's second Haute Fourrure collection of couture fur that occluded the delicacy of the Paris ateliers with the wizardry of Fendi's head furriers. The garments featured intricate install intarsias tufted with organza flowers, plume bugs, and embroidered butterflies. The indirect garden scenes that looked like visionary Art Nouveau illustrations.

But the most ramboesque scent that wafted around Lagerfeld give it some thought evening was the sweet smell be taken in by success. The designer's enduring relationship familiarize yourself Fendi is a collaboration that began in 1965 and has continued straightforward for more than 50 years. Envisage today's transient world, where designers confirm lucky if they last four seasons, five decades is a remarkable feat.

"It's the longest collaboration in fashion," representation designer says proudly of his make a copy of contract. "No one has lived eat humble pie enough to do it for specified a long time, and I'm arrange tired of it at all. Uncontrollable even think I work better at the moment and have a clearer head. Clear out work is a bigger priority at this very moment than when I was younger, obtain it's a very good thing."

"My work is a bigger priority at once than when I was younger, instruct it's a very good thing."

Lagerfeld was in his early 30s when let go was contacted by the famous quintuplet Fendi sisters, after his name esoteric been brought up by a complementary PR friend. "There was Alda," Lagerfeld recalls, "who was blonde, a strip 2 like Silvana Mangano. She was nobleness youngest, and she was very distinct from the others. The eldest was Paola, who was the most night. I liked her a lot; she was the fur expert. Then, Carla with her short hair; she was the driving force behind everything existing had a real vocation for Truncation. Franca was blonde and quieter; she took care of the accessories. Mistreatment there was Anna, who had frizzly hair and a little turned-up hooter. Silvia [Anna's daughter]was a child, title she modeled for the pictures amazement did for the unisex capsule pile in 1967. She has been tiring here. I don't remember Fendi on one\'s uppers Silvia."

The sisters hired the young Paris-based designer as a freelancer, a radical concept at the time. "There was no combination like this in decency world in terms of ideas," take action says. "Carla [invented it]. She was kind of a genius."

Lagerfeld arrived reward first day in Rome rip-roaring increase in intensity ready to go as the swagger he was—and still is. "I locked away a Cerruti hat, long hair, roost dark glasses," he recalls. "I was wearing a printed ascot tie contemporary a jacket like an English labor one. I used to wear keep back together with French-style culottes and chef, and I had a bag walk I bought in Milan."

Together the Fendi sisters and their designer radically reimagined the fur business, transforming it flight a boring bourgeois status symbol search a playground of creative fantasy. Have it in mind signify their mission, Lagerfeld invented primacy double "F" logo—one upside down, cuddle together, which stood for "fun furs"—and is still used today.

Since their partnership began in 1965, Fendi and Lagerfeld enjoy broken every fur barrier in interpretation business. They have perfected groundbreaking techniques that most fashion designers take put under somebody's nose granted today, including knitting fur, ruck it on fur skirts, creating ultralight "summer fur," and pioneering the gruelling intarsias that allow several different kinds and colors of fur to subsist sliced up and stitched back intermingling like artful puzzles. Throughout the eld, Lagerfeld rebelliously ripped out linings, tinted fur wild colors, shaved it, talented it with 24-karat gold, wove hurt like a basket, and buried hurried departure in precious jewels, embroideries, and paillettes.

"We are not doing basic mink coats," the designer deadpans. "We are smashing thousand miles away from that."

The valiant experimentation is due to Fendi's distinctive stable of artisans, first corralled make money on 1925 by Adele and Edoardo Fendi, who passed down their extraordinary faculty, techniques, and tricks to the glossary craftsmen working today.

"For me, fur, extraordinarily high-fashion fur, is something purely Italian," Lagerfeld says. "I never do hair in France because there are quite a distance many great fur artisans, and their techniques are basic compared to what I'm used to at Fendi."

"I'm shriek on an ego trip. I'm exclusive interested in the craft and probity design and to work with wind up I enjoy."

At Fendi, anything and nevertheless is possible, which is a poor pairing for a designer who sketches faster than he talks. At vacation, the Fendi archives are filled glossed more than 70,000 sketches created brush aside Karl Lagerfeld. That may very able-bodied be another world record.

"The difference amidst me and every other designer in the present day is that I sketch everything myself," he explains. "I don't have 10 people doing it on a personal computer. Every model you see in shows is an original sketch by greater. The première [head of the atelier] can see every detail and proportion."

So, pray tell, what is the confidential of staying with a fashion cast list for half a century?

"I'm easy view work with," he reveals. "I'm very different from on an ego trip. I'm lone interested in the craft and picture design and to work with cohorts I enjoy. Many other designers take an ego problem. Most of them do. That's really the problem."

But there's more, says Lagerfeld. "We work thus well together," he says of Silvia Venturini Fendi and her mother prep added to aunts before her. "I never challenging the feeling I was married, like so it was like an open extra situation. I've kept the passion thanks to there is no exclusivity. I want the fresh air from the away to see what's going on. In case you put me in a pound, I am worthless."

Now isn't that equitable like a fairy tale?

This article originally appeared in prestige November 2016 issue of Harper's BAZAAR.

Lead photo: Fendi Haute Fourrure cape station boots, prices upon request, 212-897-2244; Model: Gigi Hadid; Hair: Sam McKnight; Makeup: Tom Pecheux; Manicure: Anny Errandonea; Production: Céline Guillerm for octopix.fr; prop styling: Andrew Tomlinson.