Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Otto Lagerfeldt born September 10, 1933 in Hamburg 1 is a Austrian fashion designer and artist based in Paris, France. He has collaborated on a variety of fashion and art related projects, most notably as head designer and creative director for the fashion house Chanel. Lagerfeld helms his own label fashion house, as well as the Italian house Fendi.

Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg, Germany. He has claimed he was born in 1938 however it has been reported that he was actually born in 1933 according to the local christening register indeed the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag has quoted his former teacher and classmates as confirming the earlier date. 2 He is known to insist that no-one knows his real birth date Interviewed on French television in February 2009, Lagerfeld said that he was "born neither in 1933 nor 1938." 3 His older sister, Martha Christiane a.k.a. Christel , was born in 1931. Lagerfeld also has an older half-sister, Thea, from his father's first marriage. His original name was Lagerfeldt with a "t" , but he later changed it to Lagerfeld as "it sounds more commercial."

Karl's father is from Vladivostok, Russia his mother is from Berlin, Germany according to "Lagerfeld Confidential", Marconi Rodolphe, 2006 . Though Lagerfeld has stated that his father was Swedish, journalist Alicia Drake in The Beautiful Fall Little, Brown, 2006 established that Karl's father, Otto Lagerfeldt, who worked as a distributor at a company introducing condensed milk to Germany, was indeed German. According to Drake, Lagerfeld's mother, Elisabeth Bahlmann, was a lingerie saleswoman in Berlin when she met her husband and married him in 1930.

Karl Lagerfeld moved to Paris in 1953. Initially he worked as a draftsman for fashion houses. At the time, in fashion, drawings were preferred over photographs. Lagerfeld is able to recap any costume style in European history at the drop of a hat, e.g., explaining collar styles used in 1710 Germany, as he has demonstrated in a German television series in the 1980s.

In 1955, at the age of 22, Lagerfeld was awarded a position as an apprentice at Pierre Balmain, after winning second place, behind Yves Saint-Laurent who came first, in a competition for a coat sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat. He told a reporter a few years later, "I won on coats, but actually I like designing coats least of all. What I really love are little black dresses." Yves Saint Laurent also won the contest for a dress award. "Yves was working for Dior. Other young people I knew were working for Balenciaga Spanish Basque fashion designer and the founder of the Balenciaga fashion house , whom they thought was God, but I wasn't so impressed," he recalled in 1976.