Inside the Intimate World of Karl Lagerfeld at Sotheby’s

For the fifth and final sale of Karl Lagerfeld’s Estate, Sotheby’s Paris presents a unique exhibition of the late designer’s wardrobe items, sketches, high-tech obsessions and most intimate objects, unveiling the real person behind one of the most legendary fashion personalities. The online auction sparked a huge interest among Karl’s fans and propelled the final result to nearly ten times the high estimate, with 100% of the lots finding buyers and bringing to Sotheby’s a total of €1,112,940.  

Karl Lagerfeld was an icon. If you ask a person outside of fashion to name a fashion designer, he would always come up as one of the main names and one of the most famous designers of all time. But who was the real person behind this famous eccentric character? This is the question that the Sotheby’s teams, headed by the curator of the auction Pierre Mothes and the fashion head of sales Aurelie Vassy, tried to answer with the fifth and final instalment of Karl Lagerfel’s sale that took place in Paris with an accompanying exhibition at the new headquarters at 83 rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

“Once again, the large audience in attendance demonstrated that the magic of Karl Lagerfeld is still very much alive. A more refined selection paid a more intimate tribute to this brilliant and hypermnesic creator. Buyers had the feeling of rediscovering his design studio, as well as Karl’s archives and inspiration ‘scrapbooks,’ which he had carefully preserved,” explained Pierre Mothes, Vice President of Sotheby’s Paris, who curated the auction.

What want on sale? Emblematic pieces from Karl’s wardrobe: Lagerfeld loved blazers, and had a passion for the slim-cut, created for Dior Homme by Hedi Slimane for which the German designer famously dropped 92 pounds (42 kilograms) in the early 2000s. So there was a whole selection of his jackets from Dior, Saint Laurent and Celine, that were styled together with his favourite Hilditch&Key shirts with high collars, Chanel leather mittens and skinny jeans from Dior and Chanel, cut at the bottom to wear over his signature Massaro cowboy boots - one of the pairs in crocodile leather was sold for €5 040, 16 times more than the estimate (all of the looks were reconstructed based on the photos of his public appearances). But there were also the vests from other designers - a bit less known, Karl had a passion for collecting cool jackets, even though nobody has ever seen him wearing them, insiders know that he loved Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Prada and Maison Martin Margiela. And unsurprisingly, it’s Karl’s collection of Comme des Garçons garments that was sold for a record price of €7 800.

Karl Lagerfeld was a passionate collector and a real high-tech junkie, so the auction also had a whole section dedicated to his collection of iPods, which he was buying literally in every colour. As the legend goes, Karl loved the Apple brand so much and believed that having one meant being at the pinnacle of the latest technology, that when he saw somebody with an old iPhone at the office, he immediately offered them a new one, so that they would keep up with the most up-to-date technologies. Staying relevant was important to Karl.

Kaiser Karl also had a very special sense of humour and was following all of the political news, so for his closest friends he was making political sketches about the news - always in German, though, his most intimate native language that he almost never spoke in public. At Sotheby’s his political sketches featuring the likes of France’s former president François Hollande and Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel were shown alongside Karl’s fashion sketches (he was one the rare designers that could sketch impeccably so that his studios would understand everything from the cut to the texture of the fabric).

Finally, there was a whole section of Karl’s art de vivre - his passion for Coca-Cola, his favourite drink, Hedi Slimane’s furniture (yes, Hedi also designs furniture for friends), Christofle silverware and other home decor objects (the interest of Karl was spanning decades, he loved equally an edgy Ron Arad lamp, a futuristic Eileen Gray mirror and a classic set of 24 Meissen porcelain plates by Henry Van De Velde - the later was sold for a record sum of €102 000, 127 times the estimate). And then there was his obsession with Choupette, his Birman blue-eyed cat and life companion. She was supposed to stay with him in 2011 just for a few days, but she became so essential to him that he could never give it back to its Master, French model Baptiste Giabiconi. Choupette was actually so important to Karl, who had never had a pet before, that he was always trying to make all of his business trips shorter to come back home and hug her. And that’s what you call real love.

Courtesy: Sotheby's

Text: Lidia Ageeva