Being Karl Lagerfeld

Andrew O’Hagan steps into the encyclopedic, biting and truly wondrous mind of fashion’s one and only.

THE history of fashion is the history of longing. Nobody is born stylish. Everybody wants to be memorable, or be somebody else, or more like the self we see in the better part of our minds.

It’s 100 years since fashion took its place alongside literature, painting and music as a way to look for the social essence of one’s era. Proust saw it happening, and, in In Search of Lost Time, Madame de Guermantes’s dresses are ‘‘not a casual decoration, alterable at will, but a given, poetical reality, like that of the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain hour of the day”.