No Satellites
Lagerfeld titled the interview Am perfekten Wochenende halte ich den Mund
—on the perfect weekend, I keep my mouth shut—and you believe him. It’s published in Die Welt, conducted by Inga Griese, Ulf Poschardt, and Cornelius Tittel, and it reads the way his interviews usually read: less like a press exchange and more like a private audience you weren’t supposed to be granted.
He’s on a very short list of people whose interviews I actually finish. Not because I have any meaningful connection to fashion—I don’t, about as much as Lagerfeld has to aerospace—but because he speaks without the performance of warmth, without accessibility theater, without any apparent interest in being liked. That’s rarer than it should be.
On whether fashion people have gotten less stupid: Let’s say, fashion people are a little less stupid today.
The concession is as small as he can make it. Fashion, he argues, is the only thing in France that still actually functions, and yet not a single politician would be caught at a show. It’s like a respectable family that has a daughter who walks the streets.
On Christmas: he works Haute Couture from early December through mid-January, which makes him a homeworker while everyone else flees Paris. He has no family. I’m completely free—and that, naturally, is the peak of luxury.
There’s no self-pity in it. It sounds almost triumphant.
When the interviewers ask—visibly embarrassed to be asking—whether even close colleagues visit him over the holidays: No. I’m against overly familiar relationships with employees.
They have their own families. He doesn’t want satellites. He wants people who carry their own weight in the world, and nobody depending on him for anything beyond the work itself.
That’s the part that lodges. From outside it sounds severe. From inside it makes complete sense. There’s a coherence to Lagerfeld that most public figures spend entire careers plastering over with charm. He decided early what he was and built everything outward from there, without apology for the shape of it.
What I’d ask him if he were actually sitting across from me: how much of what he built depends on the image versus the actual work, and whether he could honestly separate the two. Whether the perfect weekend really is silence—or whether silence is also performance at this point. And whether, somewhere in all that engineered freedom, there’s anything he’s genuinely surprised by anymore.