“Kaiser” Karl Lagerfeld courted European royalty and counted the very cream of fashion amongst his closest friends.
The divisive late designer famously made Kim Kardashian cry, but he would also would spend hours on the phone to Lindsay Lohan giving her advice when she was at her lowest ebb, friends of the actress told Page Six.
On Monday night, the longtime Chanel couturier will likely be feted on the Met Gala by his friend, Vogue queen bee Anna Wintour, for the brand new exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”
Kardashian — who this week posted photos of herself cuddling as much as Lagerfeld’s famous pampered Burmese cat, Choupette (to whom he left a bulk of his estimated $220 million fortune in 2019) at his Paris studio — will likely be on the red carpet and has been planning her dress for months, Page Six is told.
A fashion source said: “Kim was offered at the least three vintage gowns. They’re working hard within the atelier to suit her curves. While she is tiny in each other area, they’re being careful as they don’t desire a repeat of the Marilyn Monroe dress.” (Kardashian reportedly tore the robe finally 12 months’s Met even after losing 16 kilos to suit into it.)
Her mother, Chanel superfan Kris Jenner, will even be there, alongside her sisters, model Kendall Jenner and make-up tycoon Kylie Jenner.
Lagerfeld once left Kim — then pregnant with daughter North West — in hysterical tears following their first photo shoot together for Harper’s Bazaar. Lagerfeld was known for giving the ladies he photographed Chanel bags, but Lagerfeld as an alternative gave a hugely expensive Chanel Lego bag to Kris, who had arrived wearing vintage Chanel.
“I used to be very hormonal and emotional from my pregnancy, so I went to the lavatory to cry after which called my cousin Cici to calm me down.” Kim said. “I used to be upset that my mom stole my moment! More importantly, I actually desired to in the future give North that bag as a token from my only pregnancy shoot.”
The legendarily caustic designer then chastised the star for flaunting her jewelry after she was robbed at gunpoint of tens of millions of dollars value of diamonds in Paris.
“You can’t display your wealth after which be surprised that some people wish to share it with you,” he said. “For those who’re that famous and you place all of your jewelry on the [internet], you go to hotels where no person can come near to the room.”
Paris Hilton, an in depth Kardashian pal, has been invited to the Met Gala for the very first time, Page Six can confirm, while Hayley Bieber, Zoe Kravitz, Uma Thurman, and Suki Waterhouse and boyfriend Rob Pattinson are also expected.
The selection of Lagerfeld as this 12 months’s theme will not be effortlessly. He once called singer Adele “a bit too fat.” Of the Princess of Wales’s sister, Pippa Middleton, he said, “I don’t just like the sister’s face. She should only show her back.”
And when the dam broke on the #MeToo movement, Lagerfeld said: “For those who don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t grow to be a model!”
“Join a nunnery, there’ll all the time be a spot for you within the convent,” he told Numero magazine in 2018 after three models accused Interview creative director Karl Templer of sexual harassment.
“I’m fed up with it,” Lagerfeld added. “What shocks me most in all of this are the starlets who’ve taken 20 years to recollect what happened.”
Wintour, 73, this week told the Recent York Times, nevertheless: “Our friendship meant every thing to me, and I miss him deeply. I’m grateful for all of the moments, reminiscent of [the Met Gala and its associated Lagerfeld exhibit], that may bring his work to life and, in the method, keep him near.”
A source near Lohan, 36, told Page Six that the actress had not been invited. “They talked on a regular basis when she was living overseas, Karl gave her advice. He just took a liking to her and he or she wore loads of Chanel,” the source said, adding that Lohan is heavily pregnant and may not have gone anyway.
Jill Kargman, whose father, Arie Kopelman, is the previous president of Chanel, told Page Six that she will likely be re-wearing her Chanel wedding gown, designed by Lagerfeld, on Monday night.
The robe actually arrived in a Chanel “coffin”-style box ahead of her wedding to Harry Kargman 21 years ago, the author revealed, as she reminisced about Lagerfeld and his “legendary quips.”
Kargman, 48, said: “I wouldn’t wish to be on his bad side, but he was someone who was so creative and artistic, you couldn’t help but be enthralled by him.
“My dad has so many fond memories of Karl. Once, there was this difficult woman at work and so they were wondering what to do along with her. Finally, Karl told my dad, ‘There’s excellent news and bad news, the excellent news is that they gave her a really nice title, ‘Vice Chairman, Special Projects’, the bad news is there are not any special projects.’”
Kargman added that Lagerfeld had his ear to the bottom on trends until the top of his life: “He was ahead of every thing.”
And Kargman raised the query of Monday’s big mystery guest: Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, who has indeed been invited.
“The one thing everyone seems to be talking about is Choupette and whether she’s coming,” Kargman said. “That’s the one thing people care about. This cat is sitting on a litter box of solid gold!”
“She got the invitation,” Lucas Berullier, Choupette’s agent and owner of My Pet Agency, which focuses on pet influencers, said Friday.
“It’s an event in honor of the legacy of Karl, and Choupette is clearly a central a part of the legacy,” Berullier added.
Nonetheless, if Choupette does attend, guests will likely be asked to not pet her as she is famously grumpy, the style source told Page Six.
Following Lagerfeld’s death at age 85 in February 2019, following a secret battle with pancreatic cancer, it was reported there have been seven beneficiaries to Lagerfeld’s estate.
They’re his muse, Baptiste Giabiconi; bodyguard Sebastien Jondeau; model and friend Jake Davis; Brad Kroenig, a model turned Florida realtor and his son Hudson, who was Lagerfeld’s godson; Caroline Lebar, Lagerfeld’s longtime publicist; and Caçote, Choupette’s caretaker.
But Lucien Frydlender, Lagerfeld’s foremost accountant for greater than three many years, has relocated to Switzerland and is believed to be affected by unwell health, thus leaving the presumed heirs at nighttime.
This week, the BBC documentary “The Mysterious Mr. Lagerfeld” tried to work out who will inherit the estate because the designer’s lawyer Céline Degoulet — who knows the names of the beneficiaries — explained: “The situation left at the top was not very tidy. This sort of big succession can take 10 years.
Not to say the incontrovertible fact that the designer’s assets are split between France and Monaco — meaning that the associated fee of processing the fortune will likely be enormous.
The doc also revealed that Jondeau was the just one who knew about Lagerfeld’s final illness, which began in June 2015, and all drugs were prescribed in Jondeau’s name to maintain the news quiet.
Gilles Defour, a former colleague of Lagerfeld at Chanel, meanwhile, recalled introducing the designer to Jacques de Bascher, who Lagerfeld admitted was the love of his life. However the two men got right into a bitter love triangle with dressmaker Yves Saint Laurent, who also loved de Bascher.
“Karl and Jacques was absolutely the proper love story and the proper unattainable story. Karl has an issue with sex. He can’t have sex. And Jacques was crazy about sex. That’s why he let Jacques, um, go in every single place,” Patrick Hourcade says within the documentary. An artist and shut friend of the designer, Hourcade kept Lagerfeld’s mother’s ashes for 2 years in his bedroom.
Giabiconi within the documentary describes his relationship with Lagerfeld more like father and son. He adds that “At one point, we had expressed a desire to in the future perhaps for Karl to adopt me. That’s what he wanted. He gave me a gift, a set of baggage from Louis Vuitton. He ordered initials on the baggage. So he put BLG, Baptiste Lagerfeld Giabiconi.”
Lagerfeld’s Connecticut-based niece, Caroline Johnson — who describes herself as “a fat American” — recalls within the documentary how Lagerfeld offered to make her a marriage gown.
“The dress didn’t come until the day before the marriage. He put it on the Concorde. It had its own seat and it was delivered by a driver to my house in the midst of a snowstorm,” she recalled.
Whether with family, friends, or colleagues, to the top, Lagerfeld remained his defiant self.
“Fashion is about elimination,” he once told The Telegraph. “I’m good at cutting people off. I can wait 10 years after which pull the chair. Sometimes people don’t even know that it was me who pulled the chair. Some are usually not even definitely worth the effort. Others are so mediocre that life takes care of them anyway.”