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You Need To Know-Designer Karl Lagerfeld.

Karl Otto Lagerfeldt (born September 10, 1933 in Hamburg) is a German fashion designer and artist based in Paris, France. He has collaborated on a variety of fashion and art related projects, most notably as head designer and creative director for the fashion house Chanel. Lagerfeld helms his own label fashion house, as well as the Italian house Fendi.

Early life

Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg, Germany. He has claimed he was born in 1938; however it has been reported that he was actually born in 1933 (according to the local christening register); indeed the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag has quoted his former teacher and classmates as confirming the earlier date. He is known to insist that no-one knows his real birth date: Interviewed on French television in February 2009, Lagerfeld said that he was "born neither in 1933 nor 1938." His older sister, Martha Christiane (a.k.a. Christel), was born in 1931. Lagerfeld also has an older half-sister, Thea, from his father's first marriage. His original name was Lagerfeldt (with a "t"), but he later changed it to Lagerfeld as "it sounds more commercial."

Karl's father is from Vladivostok, Russia; his mother is from Berlin, Germany (according to "Lagerfeld Confidential", Marconi Rodolphe, 2006). Though Lagerfeld has stated that his father was Swedish, journalist Alicia Drake in The Beautiful Fall (Little, Brown, 2006) established that Karl's father, Otto Lagerfeldt, who worked as a distributor at a company introducing condensed milk to Germany, was indeed German. According to Drake, Lagerfeld's mother, Elisabeth Bahlmann, was a lingerie saleswoman in Berlin when she met her husband and married him in 1930.

Early career (Balmain and Patou).

Karl Lagerfeld moved to Paris in 1953. Initially he worked as a draftsman for fashion houses. At the time, in fashion, drawings were preferred over photographs. Lagerfeld is able to recap any costume style in European history at the drop of a hat, e.g., explaining collar styles used in 1710 Germany, as he has demonstrated in a German television series in the 1980s.

In 1955, at the age of 22, Lagerfeld was awarded a position as an apprentice at Pierre Balmain, after winning second place, behind Yves Saint-Laurent who came first, in a competition for a coat sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat. He told a reporter a few years later, "I won on coats, but actually I like designing coats least of all. What I really love are little black dresses." Yves Saint Laurent also won the contest for a dress award. "Yves was working for Dior. Other young people I knew were working for Balenciaga (Spanish Basque fashion designer and the founder of the Balenciaga fashion house), whom they thought was God, but I wasn't so impressed," he recalled in 1976.

In 1958, after three years at Balmain, he moved to Jean Patou, where he designed two haute couture collections a year for five years. His first collection was shown in a two-hour presentation in July 1958, but he used the name Roland Karl, rather than Karl Lagerfeld (although in 1962, reporters began referring to him as Karl Lagerfelt, and Karl Logerfeld.) That first collection was poorly received. Carrie Donovan wrote that "the press booed the collection." The UPI noted: "The firm's brand new designer, 25-year old Roland Karl, showed a collection which stressed shape and had no trace of last year's sack." The reporter went on to say that "A couple of short black cocktail dresses were cut so wide open at the front that even some of the women reporters gasped. Other cocktail and evening dresses feature low, low-cut backs." Most interestingly, Karl said that his design silhouette for the season was called by the letter "K" (for Karl), which was translated into a straight line in front, curved in at the waist in the back, with a low fullness to the skirt.

His next collection, for spring 1959, was a vast improvement according to Carrie Donovan, who noted that the press "applauded widely and even shouted several bravos." She wrote that "His clothes... have a kind of understated chic, elegance, and just plain 'class' that has not been seen on this side of the Atlantic since Molyneux and Mainbocher closed up shop."

His skirts for the spring 1960 season were the shortest in Paris, and the collection was not well received. Carrie Donovan said it "looked like clever and immensely salable ready-to-wear, not couture." And in his fall 1960 collection he designed special little hats, pancake shaped circles of satin, which hung on the cheek. He called them "slaps in the face." Karl's collection were said to be well received, but were not groundbreaking. "I became bored there, too, and I quit and tried to go back to school, but that didn't work, so I spent two years mostly on beaches – I guess I studied life."

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