Karl Lagerfeld, a man possessed — by possessions

“It sounds completely improbable, but he wasn’t pretentious in any way,” says designer Marc Newson of Karl Lagerfeld. “And he was one of the funniest people I knew — he could be humorous in multiple languages. He was ridiculously opinionated, but coming from him it all made sense.”

Indeed, Lagerfeld was as famous for the grand fashion put-down — that sweatpants were a sign of defeat; or that trendy was the stage before tacky — as for his pompadoured white ponytail, high-collared shirts and the dark glasses clamped to his face.

The pair met in Paris as Newson’s career was taking off in the late 1980s, with Lagerfeld seeking out the young Australian and going on to acquire many pieces of his work, as well as taking his portrait for magazine of the moment Visionaire. “If you did something in a really straightforward, honest way, it seemed to appeal to him,” says Newson.

Now some of the Marc Newson pieces that Lagerfeld snapped up over the years — including a carbon-fibre ladder and the Zenith chair in mirrored polished aluminium — are up for sale, in a series of auctions at Sotheby’s in Monaco and Paris containing nearly 1,000 lots from the Lagerfeld estate.

“It is an enormous event,” says Pierre Mothes, vice-president of Sotheby’s, France, who is running the sale. “He was a world icon. I’ve been in taxis in China with a Tokidoki Karl hanging from the rear-view mirror.” (There is also one of the PVC figures in the sale, though in this case it belonged to Karl himself, is 25cm high and encrusted in rhinestones.) “And he was a compulsive buyer,” adds Mothes.

Newson agrees. “It’s safe to say, he was quite extravagant.” One of the lots, however, is an Atmos clock that Newson designed in 2008 for Jaeger-LeCoultre, and gave to Lagerfeld as a gift that year. “It felt like time to give something back,” he says.

Lagerfeld’s life story is well known. As a 17-year-old, in 1950, he left Hamburg for Paris, where he quickly received recognition for his skills as a fashion designer. Learning on the job in the rarefied workshops of Pierre Balmain and Jean Patou, he soon abandoned the increasingly stuffy world of couture for ready-to-wear; the prêt-à-porter sector was gathering speed, replacing home dressmaking, and Lagerfeld — ever one to sniff the zeitgeist — leapt upon its vast potential.

By the mid-1960s, he’d been invited to apply his forward- thinking to the house of Fendi, turning the dowdy Roman furrier into a fun, fashion-led label. At Chloé, he played with historical styles to create one of the first high-quality, easy-access prêt-à-porter brands.

But it was at Chanel, which he joined in 1983 (while remaining at Fendi and starting his own Karl Lagerfeld label the following year), that he made his full impact. He took its heritage of tweed, fringing, camellias and pearls and — with a large dose of irreverence — reinvented it for the times. His Chanel — with its outsized double-C logos and bouclé biker caps, a real-life elaboration of his theory that a sense of humour and a little lack of respect is required to make a legend survive — became his greatest success.

Early on, he demonstrated a keen passion for houses and furniture too. He decorated an apartment in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris as an homage to the 1924 Marcel L’Herbier film L’Inhumaine, with its sets designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Fernand Léger, furniture by Pierre Chareau and costumes by Poiret.

“I made an Art Deco plan here,” he told Patrick Hourcade — who went on to be his close friend and art adviser for 25 years, as well as the creative director of Vogue magazine — when Hourcade first visited the stage-set home, as he recounts in his book Karl: No Regrets. “But now I want to go on to something else.” It turned out he had bought a Breton manor house, and together the pair made it into a dazzling château filled with 18th-century artefacts.

In the 1980s, he bought himself an apartment in Monaco and, with the help of the interior designer du jour, Andrée Putman, filled it with Memphis design. The Italian movement, led by Ettore Sottsass, was a fantasy of surface decoration, candy colours and crazy geometric shapes, and Lagerfeld consumed it whole. The seating area in the living room was a boxing ring with baby blue and pink bars designed by the Japanese Masanori Umeda.

“It was a palace for a child,” said Putman later. “Just another sophistication for Karl.” In 1991, he sold the whole lot at auction.

By the later 1980s, he had moved to the Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo, built in 1707 in the Rue de l’Université. He filled its nearly 11,000 sq ft with valuable tapestries, panelling from the Tuileries Palace and bronzes created for Catherine the Great. “That really was a fuck-off place,” says Newson. “It was eclectic, but what really struck me was the number of books he had.”

But by 2000, it had all gone on sale again, the contents taking three full days to load into trucks. “This was when I first met him,” says Mothes, who was then with Christie’s, and worked on the valuations for the auction. “I asked him if he was sad to turn the page, and he said he wasn’t. His motto was that change wasn’t the same as betrayal.” On the final day, there was a delivery of new beds. “And they were from Ikea. Karl saw them and said, ‘Ikea! What fun!’” says Mothes.

Other friends remember the house outside of Biarritz, Elhorria — a Basque vernacular villa on a 17-hectare estate where the Olympic-sized swimming pool was always heated to 31C.

“It was there, over many summer holidays, that I began to understand that the way Karl created his homes was like the way he wanted us to feel around him,” says Lady Amanda Harlech, his long-term muse and associate at both Chanel and Fendi. “Revved up to our highest potential, inspired by the most extraordinary combinations of texture, colour and design.”

There was a delivery of new beds. ‘And they were from Ikea. Karl saw them and said, “Ikea! What fun!”

Yet Harlech particularly loved his apartment in the Quai Voltaire, which he had acquired in the early 2000s and gutted, with the help of Arch Concept, into what he would go on to call his “spaceship”. There he eliminated all stylistic references and colour, and filled it with simulated daylight and the most minimalist furniture he could find.

“It was a version of himself,” says Harlech. “X-ray black and white, but filled with books and papers, delicate white crochet and photographs.”

It is the contents of these properties — along with another apartment in Rue des Saints-Pères, with its monumental proportions, and a country house at Louveciennes, decorated in the Weimar style of his Hamburg childhood — that have fuelled the current auctions.

Lagerfeld put on possessions the way most people load a trolley for the weekly shop, and once he had alighted on contemporary design, there was no stopping him. “Sometimes we’d have to say no to him,” recalls Clémence Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo, Paris’s foremost contemporary design gallery. “I remember a show we did with Konstantin Grcic in 2014, and Karl wanted to buy four of everything.”

The collection was a series of chairs, tables and chests in industrial glass, attached with pistons and silicone, and Lagerfeld always fell for the new and surprising. “I never met him,” says Grcic, “but someone told me he’d bought my pieces for Choupette.” Choupette, a Birman cat who was Lagerfeld’s dearest companion in his last years and had her own Instagram account, was certainly spoilt enough for that to be the case.

Choupette appears in the auction, of course, in drawings and in a ceramic work by Joana Vasconcelos. Grcic’s work is also plentiful. Apart from the glass series, his “Volumes” — natural bluestone objects each cut from a single block of stone — greeted visitors in the entrance hall of the Rue des Saints-Pères.

The French minimalist Martin Szekely is well represented, with Lagerfeld loving the almost immaterial quality of his pared-down designs — in polished metal consoles, tables in Corian and honeycombed aluminium, and dark mirrors made of silicon carbide.

And then there’s the Bouroullec brothers’ work. Lagerfeld reckoned he owned a piece of every single thing they’d ever designed, including the Quilt sofa, one of their best designs, which had pride of place in the Rue des Saints-Pères.

Perhaps what marks out Lagerfeld’s taste most clearly is the sort of appreciation of an exquisite line that you might expect from someone who was himself a great illustrator. It certainly unites the 18th-century French design, Art Deco and all these contemporary practitioners. “We found 25 pieces by [Art Deco virtuosi] Louis Süe and André Mare still in his collection,” says Pierre Mothes. They include a pair of shell-backed armchairs, which are among my favourites in the auction.

Lagerfeld’s acquisitiveness didn’t stop with furniture, though. In the auction there are Goyard trunks and Comme des Garçons jackets; crystal chandeliers from the 19th and 20th centuries; a make-up box from Shu Uemura; and his own Chanel shoulder bag.

Mothes tells me how he discovered a drawer of 509 iPods at one of Lagerfeld’s homes, and then a further 70 in his office in the 7th arrondissement. “He was a man of his period,” he says. “I’m quite keen to put these into a separate digital auction, later on.”

“He certainly wasn’t scared by the new,” says Newson. “And he was obsessed by iPods. He was always giving them to Charlotte [Stockdale, Newson’s wife, who is a stylist at Fendi].” These would come preloaded with music, brilliantly mixed by Michel Gaubert, DJ darling of the French fashion world.

Rest assured, though, that it’s not all in the best possible taste. There is a Murakami artwork of Karl in his powdered white pompadour ponytail and dark glasses against a psychedelic backdrop of flowers; that Tokidoki doll; more monogrammed letter openers than you can imagine; and heaps of fingerless gloves in red, black, metallics and chainmail. Because, of course, it wouldn’t be Karl without them.

Auction highlights

Pair of ‘Man Machine’ chairs by Konstantin Grcic
Estimate €8,000-€12,000

Lagerfeld loved Grcic’s “Man Machine” collection so much, he tried to buy the whole show when it was exhibited at Galerie Kreo in 2014. The use of industrial glass and the fixings in pistons and silicone had a strong appeal. “We had to remind him that he wasn’t our only customer,” says the gallery’s co-founder Clémence Krzentowski, “that other people might want a few pieces too!”

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AC console by Martin Szekely
Estimate €10,000-€15,000

Designs by Szekely proliferated throughout Lagerfeld’s relentlessly minimal apartment at Quai Voltaire, including this aluminium and polished steel console. “No one has as many pieces of Martin’s furniture as I do,” said Lagerfeld. There was no reason to doubt him.

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Carbon ladder by Marc Newson
Estimate €20,000-€30,000

“It’s very light, and very strong,” says Newson of this chic carbon-fibre ladder. “It turned out to be a really functional design, and it’s one of my favourites.” A rare piece, with just 18 made, keen Newson collectors will be set to bid strongly for this. Lagerfeld loved the brilliant new materials of the later 20th century. He used the ladder to reach books in his Rue des Saints-Pères apartment.

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