Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific fashion designer of the 20th and 21st centuries, was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Biographies contradict one another. His age was a mystery, with reports that he had two birth certificates, one dated 1933 and the other 1938. Living alone in Paris with a Siamese cat called Choupette, he once declared: “I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.”
Capturing Lagerfeld on screen might therefore seem like pinning down a ghost. But that did not deter the German-Spanish actor Daniel Brühl who, early in his preparation for playing the revered couturier in a six-part TV series, had an epiphany. What if he conceived of Lagerfeld as a matador in the bullring?
