Do we like Karl Lagerfeld?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A real pattern of cutting remarks about women, bodies and migrants, with a few good gestures (like the gay-marriage runway moment) alongside.
Born in Hamburg (sources disagree on the year, with 1933 the usual answer), Lagerfeld won a 1954 wool coat competition and started as an assistant at Balmain. He then moved through Patou and freelance illustration, and ran Chloé and Fendi by the mid-60s. In 1983 he took over Chanel and ran it for over three decades, until he died on 19 February 2019.
Nothing new has turned up from him lately, for the obvious reason that he died in 2019. What the internet keeps reopening is his back catalogue of hot takes, most loudly when the Met Gala picked him as a theme in 2023 and critics pointed straight at them.
The body comments were a long-running habit. In 2012 he said Adele was “a little too fat”, and in 2013 he went on French TV and blamed fat people for a hole in social security. A group for fuller-figured women then lodged a complaint alleging discrimination and defamation; the report doesn't say how that ended.
On #MeToo he told Numéro in 2018 “If you don't want your pants pulled about, don't become a model!” He also said he didn't believe a word of the accusations against stylist Karl Templer, who has denied them. That's a pretty clear read on how he treated people coming forward.
In November 2017 he went on French TV and brought up the Holocaust while attacking Angela Merkel's decision to admit refugees. French regulator CSA said it was reviewing the show after several hundred complaints. Time also lists a 2010 photo shoot in blackface and yellowface among the things people hold against him.
It wasn't all bad. In 2013 he sent two brides down the Chanel couture runway to back same-sex marriage in France, and said “Of course it was.” On fur, he told the New York Times it was an industry and that he'd rather not know where it comes from. Animal lovers will wince at that one.