IN THE NOW.

The headquarters of Chanel are situated in two adjacent eighteenth-century buildings on the Rue Cambon, in Paris, occupying a labyrinthine suite of rooms on five floors, above a street-level Chanel boutique. One evening last December, Karl Lagerfeld, the label's artistic director, and twenty-two assistants--hair, makeup, shoes, jewelry, music--crammed into a room on the complex's top floor to conduct a fitting for a collection that was to be shown six days later, in Monte Carlo. Many male designers wear T-shirts and jeans not only to work but also at runway shows--as if to suggest that they are somehow above the world of trend and fashion they inhabit. Lagerfeld, who was dressed in a tight Dior suit of broad gray and blue stripes, and a pair of aviator sunglasses, disdains this practice. "I don't think I'm too good for what I'm doing," he says. His starched shirt had a four-inch-high collar that fit snugly under his chin, and his hair--whitened with a gesso-like dry shampoo--was pulled into a ponytail. His large belt buckle was encrusted with diamonds; his tie, looped with silver chains, was fixed with a jade Cartier clasp from the nineteen-twenties. He was wearing fingerless black biker gloves that bore silver grommets, etched with the Chanel logo, on each knuckle and were equipped, at the wrists, with small zippers that carried faintly S & M overtones. "Tres chic, non?" he said, holding up a hand to be admired. A chunky Chrome Hearts ring adorned the pinkie finger, over the glove.

Lagerfeld took a seat at a long table at one end of the room. Sipping from a glass of Coke Zero--fresh glasses were brought to him at intervals on a lacquer tray by an assistant--he surveyed the fitting model, a baby-faced woman with a slim, ideally proportioned body, which Lagerfeld nevertheless judged to be a little plump. "She has maybe two kilos that she should lose," he whispered to his top assistant, Virginie Viard. Over the next three hours, the model tried on a series of garments that Lagerfeld had spent the previous six weeks conceiving: embroidered tweed skirt suits, tulle dresses festooned with camellias, and skintight flannel-Lycra pants. Each garment provoked swooning cries from his retinue:

"Oooo, la, Karl!"

"Tres jolie!"

"Superbe!"

Lagerfeld accepted the praise with a shrug. "I do my job like I breathe," he said, in his customary manner--rapid, declamatory speech made more emphatic by a heavy German accent. "So if I can't breathe I'm in trouble!"

Since Lagerfeld took over Chanel, in 1983, more than a decade after the death of its founder, Coco Chanel, it has become one of the most profitable luxury brands in the world, with revenues estimated at more than four billion dollars a year. (The company is privately owned and does not release earnings figures.) A significant portion of the income comes from sales of accessories and makeup, and from No. 5 perfume, which was created by Chanel herself, in 1921. But accessories and perfume cannot sustain a fashion brand's prestige; the company must also stage extravagant runway shows featuring garments of outlandishness, originality, and fantastic expense. Lagerfeld, despite being nearly twice the age of many of his competitors at other labels (he admits to sixty-eight), has been able, season after season, to generate excitement and demand for Chanel's clothes. "His major strength is to be about his business in the present and never have a moment for other people to think that he's passe," Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair (and, before that, of this magazine) and a friend of Lagerfeld's for thirty years, says. Lagerfeld has maintained his preeminence for five decades, and without any visible sign of strain--unlike his contemporary Yves Saint Laurent, who, until he retired, in 2002, took a Proustian attitude to designing collections, experiencing nervous breakdowns over the hemline juste. "Yves pursued the goal of poetic designer suffering for his art," Roberts says. "I can't imagine Karl for one minute sitting down and thinking, I'm going to suffer for my art. Why should he? It's just dresses, for God's sake."