King Karl

I'm a few issues behind in New York magazine, so this morning I was up early and decided to ease into the day with some light reading. I'm not sure why this piece of dialogue amused me so. All I know is that Karl Lagerfeld has been on my radar this week because all this apartment purging I've been doing produced a pair of Lagerfeld loafers I hadn't worn in years.

“In the whole world, there is nowhere I can go,” says Lagerfeld in a tone that should have him fluttering that old fan. “Everybody has a camera, and it is flash-flash-flash, and I am a puppet, a marionette, Mickey at Disneyland for children to play with. In Japan, they touch me. I have Japanese women pinch my ass, so now I must say, ‘You can have the photo, but please don’t touch me.’ You cannot pinch the ass of a man my age! And I cannot go out without something for my eyes, because someone might throw chemicals in my face, and I would be like my childhood French teacher whose wife burnt him with acid, Mr. Pommes-Frites, can you believe the name. I can cross the street nowhere in the world, I can never go into a shop. Oh, it’s horrible, horrible.” Lagerfeld, the master of the contrapuntal, grins a bit and then whispers, “In fact, I do like it. It’s very flattering, and very fun.”

A refreshing kind of honesty, yes? A genius of fashion and a bit of a cut-up as well. I've already worn the black (of course!) loafers with the silver-plated heel twice this week. Best I can recall is that I bought them in the early 1990s. Now that's a timeless purchase.

Classic.