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.