I got the link to this totally epic, completely real interview with Karl Lagerfeld from Gawker, in a piece Gawker titled “Karl Lagerfeld Prefers Hookers to Heartfelt Sex”. So you know from the start it’s going to be good! Oh, Anger Bear. I love you. And by saying that I love you, I ensure that you’ll never want to have sex with me. Dry heave. Sidenote: Karl is known as “The Kaiser”. Coincidence? Actually, yes. Moving on! Let’s get to the good stuff, shall we?
Karl on his personal philosophy: “Down-to-earth. Sophisticated down-to-earth. I love paradoxes. Truth is only a question of point of view.”
On his sunglasses, which he doesn’t like to be photographed without: “They’re my burka. A burka for a man. I’m a little shortsighted, and people, when they’re shortsighted, they remove their glasses and then they look like cute little dogs who want to be adopted. I want to stay shortsighted or else I will need glasses for reading. But I don’t want them because I sketch, I do everything without glasses, except for speaking to strangers. Especially if they wear glasses, too.
Anger Bear tells a special story: “I had an interview once with some German journalist—some horrible, ugly woman. It was in the early days after the communists—maybe a week after—and she wore a yellow sweater that was kind of see-through. She had huge tits and a huge black bra, and she said to me, “It’s impolite; remove your glasses.” I said, “Do I ask you to remove your bra?”
“Everything comes from the same place”: “Yes, exactly. Everything comes from the same head. The three things I like best in life are fashion, photography, and books. There are a lot of other things I may like but that I’m not gifted for. I’m not gifted for music. I’m not gifted for singing. I don’t like to act because my life is a pantomime anyway.”
On fame: “You cannot fight against it. There’s a price you have to pay for fame, and people who don’t want to pay that price can get in trouble. I accepted the idea of celebrity because of a French expression: “You cannot have the butter and the money for the butter.” And now I cannot cross the street. I cannot go anywhere. I have bodyguards. I have big cars… I don’t travel commercially. Whenever I go around the world I go on private jets.
Is he interested in both high and low culture? That is because there is only culture. I like to know everything; I like to be informed. I am not pretentious. I can speak several languages. I can read in every language.
On political correctness: “hard work is like being politically correct. Be politically correct, but please don’t bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that’s the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation. It means people talking about charities. Do it, be charitable, but don’t make a subject of conversation out of it because then you bore the world to death. It’s very unpleasant. But I don’t go out a lot so I’m not so exposed to people.”
On being against gay marriage and children: “Yes, I’m against it for a very simple reason: In the 60s they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life. For me it’s difficult to imagine—one of the papas at work and the other at home with the baby. How would that be for the baby? I don’t know. I see more lesbians married with babies than I see boys married with babies. And I also believe more in the relationship between mother and child than in that between father and child. If I were interested in children, I would be a godfather—or a godmother. I don’t like the idea of taking people out of their lives and their contexts. If there were a child I wanted to adopt, I would try to find the family of the child and give them the money for an education in his life and his context.”
On AIDS: “I don’t want to go back through that age. In those days it was a hopeless case. It was horrible. Beyond horrible. It killed a whole generation of people.”
On being gay: “When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said—and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded—“It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.” This was a very healthy attitude. Some people make drama out of it. I don’t even understand. It’s not a problem. It doesn’t exist. It’s not a subject. For me it never was.
On politics: “I’ve never voted in my life—for any kind of politics. I’m in fashion. Politics is not my job. I don’t vote in France even though foreigners here can. I will never vote in my life.
On porn & escorts: “I admire porn. And I personally only like high-class escorts. I don’t like sleeping with people I really love. I don’t want to sleep with them because sex cannot last, but affection can last forever. I think this is healthy. And for the way the rich live, this is possible. But the other world, I think they need porn. I also think it’s much more difficult to perform in porn than to fake some emotion on the face as an actor. I admire porn actors.
[From Vice Magazine]
There is literally so, so much more, but I just wanted to get those quotes out there. I mean, Karl is insane. But I kind of love him too. He’s horrible and angry and crazy, but you know what? He’s got a strange kind of existential, morose consistency that I kind of admire. He’s a true misanthrope.
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