Search for ‘Andrew O'Hagan’ (2 articles found)
Karl Lagerfeld, the Philip Johnson of Fashion?
‘‘You know St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck?’’ I asked.
‘‘Absolutely,’’ he replied. ‘‘My father had one of his factories less than five miles from Lübeck.’’ His eyes lit up as we began to speak of the Old World.
‘‘In 1942, when that church was attacked by Allied bombers,’’ I said, ‘‘the bells in the belfry — which were several hundred years old — half melted and fell to the floor. They are embedded there to this day. The church was rebuilt around them. And those were the bells that Thomas Mann heard every morning of his childhood.’’
‘‘Yes, this is the past.’’ Lagerfeld said. ‘‘But the past embellished by our minds. This is different. History is not interesting — what is interesting is the anecdote.’’
Lagerfeld was 49 when he became head designer at Chanel. It seemed perfect, and many of the designers who came after — Tom Ford, Riccardo Tisci — had much to learn from him about how to revivify an old brand. His empire grew until it began to look, as it does today, an unmistakable part of the world, and his secret, according to him, was to keep working harder than anybody else and to scent newness while renovating tradition. ‘‘Fashion is also an attempt to make certain invisible aspects of the reality of the moment visible,’’ he wrote in the catalog that accompanied Chanel’s landmark 2005 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
An elderly gentleman in his nineties lived in the same Glasgow tenement as my father. Once in the late 1980s, when we were coming down the stairs, we met the old gent struggling down with two walking sticks. Ernie, it was said, had been a legendary safe-blower fifty years before, he had done his time, spent his money, and was now making his way to the Empire Bar for his daily pint of beer. ‘Ernie,’ my dad said, ‘this is my youngest, Andrew. He’s studying to go to the university.’
‘Fuck sake,’ the pensioner said. ‘You’re your granda’s double. The very same face. What a man he was. Mind you, he was trouble. Always trouble. He could peel an orange through a keyhole.’
I could tell my father was laughing with pride. When we got to the street everybody said hello to Ernie as they passed. He repeated the comment about the orange and then stopped to inspect my face. ‘Aye,’ he said, catching my arm, ‘and he would try to sell you the peel into the bargain.’
