Step through the sliding glass door at 7 Rue de Lille in Paris and you’ll find yourself inside the sumptuous psyche of one of fashion’s most prodigious figures. Karl Lagerfeld, the designer who left an indelible mark on visual culture during his 36-year tenure at Chanel, founded Librairie 7L in 1999, converting a former art gallery into a photographic studio, bookshop and library. Its cavernous atrium is lined with printed matter spanning Balthus to David Bailey, Goethe to Andreas Gursky, slow diets to fast food. Speaking to the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2014 in his direct and unsentimental style, Lagerfeld said: ‘My paradise is a library ... I am a paper freak. I was born a paper freak … I was not interested in anything else but books, books, books and drawing paper.’ Librairie 7L is sublime proof of that.
