imperial splendors; Karl Lagerfeld has taken a legend and turned it into a masterpiece.

Byline: Kennedy Fraser

Karl Lagerfeld is a complex, brilliant, postmodern sort of man. He gives the impression that there is nothing you can think-especially nothing you might think about Karl Lagerfeld-that he hasn't thought of for himself. "Perhaps I am pretentious," he will say with a smile. Or "in a way my life is bizarre and eccentric, but to me it is the most normal thing in the world." His life is ceremonial, even when he is alone. On the eve of a recent collection, I saw him pause at the top of the famous mirrored staircase of the Chanel salon in the rue Cambon. There (where Mademoiselle once sat on the third stair down, in her tweed boater, surreptitiously watching the audience for her shows) was Lagerfeld reflected by the angles of the Art Deco walls. Many Karls, wearing their hair in a white-powdered ponytail, lifted a hand with knuckles half-hidden in biker rings to check the knot below a starched collar a full four inches high. The same platoon of Karls gazed back through dark-tinted spectacles as if checking up on their collective mood. "I am a puppet of my own life," he once told me. "A marionette. Not a human being." The mirror moment passed. There was another pause at the threshold, a perceptible presentational instant, as if he were poised on the balls of his feet in order to see and be seen. Now he stepped into a square of brightness, already speaking to the people in the room. His step is light and quick. He loves ballroom dancing, and one friend compares him to Giacometti's striding man. He looked inquisitive, happy, eager to work with the people from the ateliers and the models. He treats these co-workers of his with courtesy and kindness.

Rilke, a poet he reveres for the untranslatable beauty of his German, once wrote, "We are born provisionally, it doesn't matter where. It is only gradually that we compose within ourselves our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively and each day more definitely." Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg in 1938, but his life could have flowered the way it did only in Paris, where he moved when he was a teenager. He trained at the couture studios of Pierre Balmain and became head designer at Patou when he was 20. (Yves Saint Laurent, a friend of Karl's in their youth, became the head of Dior at 21. "There are no young designers or old designers," Karl says, dismissing the way new names are now pushed as if they were rock stars by the moneymen in corporations. "You're there as long as you're OK for the job. It's like movie stars-based on nothing. There is no justice. You cannot expect pity.") He became well known when designing for the luxurious ready-to-wear firm of Chloe, in the seventies. He has designed furs and fashions for the Italian firm of Fendi since 1965. And he has been a freelance designer for various manufacturers of shoes, jeans, and knits. He produces a line of his own, called Lagerfeld Gallery. And these days he works continually as a commercial photographer-a second career that enables him to create many of his own advertising campaigns, editorial coverage of his fashions, and portraits of himself. But in the blossoming of Lagerfeld's celebrity-if not his rebirth as a Parisian-nothing has the weight of his masterminding fashions at Chanel.

After a triumphant comeback that began in 1954, Coco Chanel withdrew into a shadowy and embittered old age and died at 87 in 1971. Her house belonged to the Wertheimers, perfume manufacturers who had invested in No 5 in the early twenties. In 1983 Alain Wertheimer, having taken the reins of the privately held company, asked Lagerfeld to give the kiss of life to the house. For a decade the fashion had been ticking over in a shadowy backwater, taking care of aging clients. "If you want to ruin a business, be respectful," Lagerfeld says. "Fashion is not about respect. It's about fashion." With an impeccable sense of timing he created the clothes, the publicity, and the atmosphere that drove the Chanel company forward. In German, ...