Costume historians will doubtless look back on the day Karl Lagerfeld died in February 2019, leaving in his will lavish instructions for the ongoing care of his Birman cat Choupette, as the precise moment when the fun finally went out of high fashion. Yes, it’s possible another full-blown eccentric will one day preside over a big house. But it doesn’t feel, in the era of the global conglomerate, terribly likely. “Creation,” as Lagerfeld once put it, “is not a democratic process.” The more people (I may mean accountants) who stick their oar in, the more likely we are to get half a dozen good camel coats on a catwalk than the kind of show, raffiné but wildly exuberant, that could reduce the late André Leon Talley, of American Vogue, to tears of joy. The cape-clad, fan-carrying, monocle-wearing, be-ponytailed Lagerfeld was the last of the last and he deserves a serious biography.
Does Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld do the job? Or is it, like a toile, only about halfway there? William Middleton, its author, certainly has the fashion chops: he used to head the Paris bureau of Women’s Wear Daily. But the trouble with insiders is that their respect is usually too ardent, and their need to remain on good terms with their world’s big names too powerful, for the distance required of biography. Yes, he gives us in its entirety the long reign of Kaiser Karl, from his peculiar childhood in Germany to the lonely months at the end when he was secretly fighting cancer, leaving out – or so it feels – not a single one of the parties he threw along the way.
