Vanessa Friedman

So the dust has settled on the sale of the stores once known as Barneys New York. The final shopping has begun at their soon-to-be-vacated locations, and the social media mourning is in full swing. Saks has emerged as a caretaker of the retail self of a former rival, licensed to Saks’s parent company by Authentic Brands Group, which bought Barneys’ intellectual property.

Now the drumroll has begun for a new concept: Barneys-at-Saks. It is a … something … that will possibly be on the fifth floor of the Saks department store in New York, and will possibly be about 50,000 square feet, and will possibly be, well, no one is exactly sure. I’ve been a customer at both — Saks for its accessible elegance, Barneys for its more rarefied cool — for much of my adult shopping life, and days after the news broke, I’m still trying to understand what this new hybrid could be.

During the bankruptcy auction, Marc Metrick, the chief executive of Saks, and Tracy Margolies, the chief merchant, sent a letter to the company’s partners that gives a little hint: “We are working to best understand what customers love about the brand and how we can bring that forward as we evolve it into a new interpretation that is relevant for today’s luxury consumer.”

But what exactly will that new interpretation be? Isn’t shopping in a Barneys at Saks sort of like browsing a Nike section at an Adidas shop or grabbing a Whopper at the home of the Big Mac? It’s confusing to the taste buds and redundant in the Darwinian order of things.

To be fair, the license for the name apparently didn’t cost Saks too much — the company expects to devote only “minimal financial resources,” according to the letter. So perhaps for Saks, the optics of becoming the big retail whale, swallowing its rival whole, may be worth the confusion. Saks might also believe that Barneys is that rare mercantile unicorn: a store that transcends the goods it sells.

They are betting, in effect, on the anthropomorphism of retail.

That’s the premise, anyway, of this unexpected move by ABG, the company that owns the Barneys brand. ABG is presuming that in today’s multiplatform world, a brand name and what it stands for is the most valuable form of commodity. Products are fungible and of secondary consideration, and ABG has proof of concept for this strategy in the form of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley, among other branded people, like Judith Leiber and Vince Camuto, whose trademarks ABG also owns and licenses.

This may be true for individuals, who endure through voice and image in photos and films. That lasting record preserves the meaning of their names even as they are slapped on mugs sold at Walmart. And this may make sense for a designer brand with its own creative archive. But a store is a different matter.

Especially a store that does not itself make anything, but simply selects — or in today’s parlance, “curates.” That sort of store, which is to say, the Barneys sort of store, is above all given meaning not just through its physical presence, its décor and the products it stocks, but also through the people it attracts. So it has been from the Greek agora through Zola’s “The Ladies Paradise”: the gathering place of the group. It is this constantly evolving give-and-take between animating principles that makes a store a destination.

When other retail pairings have worked — Topshop at Nordstrom, Maria Luisa at Printemps in Paris — it is because they represent two entirely different points of view, each with its own clubhouse. Even if ABG might keep a Barneys store in Boston or open one in Greenwich, Conn., as rumor has it, it won’t be the same without the Madison Avenue flagship.

Shorn of its once idiosyncratic temples to cool and separated by generations from the man who gave his name to the store (there really was a Barney, and his grandson Gene at least tried to be the embodiment of the cool the brand was selling) and absent a recognizable brand semiology like Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag, Barneys becomes just a word. And a memory.

Arguably, the generation for whom the store was most resonant — those who came of age in the “Sex and the City” era, when Barneys was shorthand for New York’s most impenetrably chic inner circle — are already past target-consumer age. And for those who are the targets, Gens Y and Z, Barneys means very little. It’s just another passé department store, like Bonwit Teller or B. Altman, where their parents or grandparents used to shop.

It is possible that Saks can change that, by imbuing its Barneys with totally different products and a palpable attitude. Barneys could become, for example, an incubator for new designers, which it sort of was back in the day. It is possible this could signal a whole new stage in retail relationships. ABG’s chief executive told Women’s Wear Daily that other luxury retailers have already made inquiries. Just imagine it: Barneys at Lane Crawford! Barneys at Tsum! Barneys at Selfridges!

And it is possible that in the time it takes Barneys at Saks to materialize, former Barneys shoppers will nurture their nostalgia instead of moving on and will ultimately migrate to Barneys at Saks because they still want those particular branded French fries, rather than the other type of branded fries.

But it is also possible that at some point they will just shrug their shoulders and acknowledge they come from the same potatoes. And that the next era of retail really requires cooking up something entirely different.

This article originally appeared in

The Impossible Alchemy of Barneys at Saks

(Sunday Review) (News Analysis)

The cause was breast cancer, her husband, artist Ruben Toledo, said.

Uninterested in the limelight or in logos, Isabel Toledo was a rarity in the modern fashion world. Devoted to fashion as a craft and an expression of self and embedded in the downtown New York art scene, she was a throwback to a time before the designer became the creative director. She toiled away in a picturesque loft in midtown Manhattan with Ruben Toledo, her partner since high school, dipping into the worlds of art, dance and theater for the sheer joy of aesthetic collaboration.

Called a genius by Valerie Steele, curator of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and a cult hero by Kim Hastreiter, a founder of Paper magazine, Isabel Toledo has been compared to designers Charles James and Geoffrey Beene because of her obsession with construction. She described her own work as “romantic mathematics.”

“I’m not supposed to say I’m not a fashion person, but I’m not. I just, I love design,” she told CNN in 2012. “Design is so different than fashion. That’s why design lasts forever. It’s like an engineer. I love to engineer a garment.”

Toledo was the recipient of a National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt museum in 2005, was nominated for a Tony for the costumes for the musical “After Midnight” in 2014 and twice appeared on the International Best-Dressed List.

In 2009, the museum at FIT staged a solo retrospective of her work. But she was never snobby about her vocation, delighting in the idea that her work might find a wider audience through her position as creative director of Anne Klein from 2006 to 2007 and her collections for Lane Bryant, created at a time when the fashion world still largely ignored the plus-size consumer.

“Fashion is every woman’s language, every woman’s tool,” she told Interview magazine in 2014 when her Lane Bryant collections made their debut. “My ideal happens to be diversity. I love difference. I love change. I love experimentation and eccentricities.” She also embodied her own ideals: Her favorite workout was twisting with a hula hoop.

Maria Isabel Izquierdo was born April 9, 1960, in Camajuani, Cuba, to Felix and Bertha Izquierdo. She began sewing at age 8 because, she told CNN, “I couldn’t find anything I loved.”

She emigrated with her parents and two sisters to the United States, and in 1968 the family settled in West New York, New Jersey, where she met Ruben Toledo. She was 14, and he was 13. (His family was also from Cuba; they were in the same Spanish class in school.)

She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and later transferred to Parsons School of Design. She left in 1979 before graduation to intern for Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She and Ruben Toledo — who were seldom apart, and who seemed to have the kind of transcendent love story reserved for Hollywood movies — married in 1984. He survives her, along with two sisters, Mary Santos and Anna Bertha Izquierdo.

Also in 1984, Isabel Toledo introduced her own line, made largely in the couple’s loft. Its first appearance was at a Danceteria happening, thanks to artist Joey Arias, a good friend, who ran the events. Though she became an official part of New York Fashion Week in 1985 and her pieces were soon picked up by Barneys New York, Colette in Paris, Joyce in Hong Kong and Ikram in Chicago, among others, she never lost her affinity for the raw edge.

She also remained at the head of an independent company. “Isabel was a pure, uncorrupted fashion designer,” said Ikram Goldman, founder of Ikram, who introduced Michelle Obama to Toledo’s work. “She designed spectacular, innovative pieces that flattered every curve of a woman’s body, and she never conformed to or accepted the ‘fashion system.’ ”

Though that choice may have hurt Toledo’s business in later years, as fashion globalized and commodified — she stopped showing on the runway around the turn of the millennium when the cost became prohibitive — it also allowed her to follow her own muse.

By 2009, when Obama chose a Toledo dress and matching coat to wear for her husband’s historic inauguration — a dress that was widely heralded as a triumph, and that helped frame the first lady’s signature use of her position to promote smaller American designers and celebrate the melting pot of America — it seemed the world had finally recognized Toledo’s gift.

In 2012 she published her autobiography, “Roots of Style: Weaving Together Life, Love, and Fashion.” The illustrations were by Ruben Toledo, of course.

“She was often marginalized by the trend-loving fashion business, but she never looked sideways,” Hastreiter wrote in an email. But, she said, “her rare gift of combining great design for all women (no matter economic class, shape and size) with flawless craft and astounding original creative beauty” meant that “Isabel Toledo will be in the history books.”

Isabel Toledo Dies at 59; Designed Michelle Obama's Inaugural Outfit

Isabel Toledo, the Cuban American designer who was revered by other designers for her ability to combine precisely geometric construction with extreme grace — but who was known to most of the public as the designer of the dress Michelle Obama wore in the 2009 inaugural parade — died Monday at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 59.

“Someday,” Schreier, now in her 80s, would tell him, “my pieces of couture will be here with all these gorgeous paintings and sculptures.”

The “pieces of couture” she was talking about turned out to be one of the most important private fashion collections in the United States that most people have never heard of, and this November Schreier will get her wish when “In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection” opens at the Met’s Costume Institute.

Unlike other individuals who have had shows dedicated to their wardrobes, such as Jacqueline de Ribes and Nan Kempner, however, Schreier was not shopping for herself and never wore the clothes she adored. She began collecting as a child and over her lifetime amassed approximately 15,000 pieces of Schiaparelli, Chanel, Lanvin, Fortuny, Adrian and the like — 165 of which are a promised gift to the Costume Institute, part of the Met’s 150th anniversary collections drive. (It is undecided when they will officially become part of the museum’s collection.) About 80 of those pieces will make up the show.

“She was a pioneer in seeing fashion as an art form that could be pursued and collected; when she started, almost no individuals and very few museums were thinking about fashion in that way,” said Jessica Regan, associate curator of the Costume Institute. Now, though, they are all after her.

Schreier has lent pieces to various shows in the past, and designers including Calvin Klein and Edith Head made pilgrimages to her secret storage facility in Detroit to see her collection. But this exhibition will be the first time the public gets a comprehensive view of it — and, for many, the first time they hear her name.

So who is this unmasked woman? She got on the phone from Detroit to answer some questions. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q: How did you start collecting?

A: My father was a protégé of David Nemerov, the president of the Manhattan department store Russeks and the father of Diane Arbus; he started working in the mailroom while he was going to college and worked his way up. So when Russeks decided to open its only branch in Detroit, because that’s where all the automotive moguls were, with wives who all wore couture but maybe didn’t want to travel to Paris, they asked him if he wanted to run the fur department and be an assistant store manager. He did, and that’s where I was born.

But when I was little there were no nurseries and my mother was busy with my little sister, so my dad would take me to work with him. I’d just sit on the shop floor, and I fell in love with fashion: The staff would dress me up, and I would look at all the pictures in the magazines. At that time, it was no longer fashionable to pass clothes down, and my dad’s clientele saw how much I loved the clothes and started sending me their couture after they had worn it once, or sometimes not at all. Their drivers would bring the boxes over.

Q: Wait — how old were you?

A: Three or four. I never really thought of what I was doing as collecting, though. I was just acquiring these wonderful things.

Q: What would you do with them?

A: We had an unfinished room in our house that I think was intended to be a playroom, and I put all the boxes there: from Lanvin, from Chanel. My parents used to say we would die of old clothes disease. One Halloween my mother insisted I wear one of the dresses as my costume and I had a huge temper tantrum and refused. Even then, I didn’t want anyone wearing them.

Q: Why not?

A: I always said, “If I owned a Picasso, it would not be on my back.”

Q: Did you buy your pieces?

A: When I started, there was no such thing as a vintage clothing store or vintage dealers. Purely by accident I started going on radio and talk shows and news programs and talking about fashion — they used to call it “social living,” because fashion was frivolous — and then later movie fashion, and then people around the country who were listening or watching heard about me and started sending me pieces. Most of my collection was given to me.

Q: What are some of your favorites?

A: One dress I think is extremely exciting belonged to Mrs. Dodge (Matilda Dodge Wilson, the wife of a founder of the Dodge car company); I call it my Egyptian dress. It’s by a couture house called Madeleine &amp; Madeleine, and it is all covered in hieroglyphic embroidery.

There’s the metal mesh minidress Twiggy wore in a famous Richard Avedon picture that ran in Vogue in 1967; when she decided to move back from Los Angeles to Britain she had seen articles about me, so she called and asked me if I would like the dress. Countess Tolstoy, who was the sister-in-law of the writer, came here and brought her couture. And there’s a gold lamé bathing swimsuit by Schiaparelli. I have an incredible swimwear collection; that, to me, is the story of women’s liberation.

In the 1960s I was also a model for Vidal Sassoon — he came to Detroit for a hair show and we met, and then he invited me to come to London, and I met Zandra Rhodes and Mary Quant and became their friend, and when I left to come home, Mary gifted me with some amazing pieces she made.

Q: How did you decide what is going to the Met?

A: I met Harold Koda (the former curator in charge) a long time ago, and then I met Andrew (Bolton, now the curator in charge). He came here with his dream team and selected their pieces. They have been so supportive of me — they made me realize what I am doing is important.

Q: Why did you decide to give part of your collection away?

A: I have lived most of my life in a fairy tale world, and when my husband got sick and passed away a few years ago, I came down to earth with a thud. I have four children and seven grandchildren, and they are almost all lawyers or married to lawyers — my husband was a lawyer — and only one, my eldest granddaughter, does anything close to fashion. She works for LVMH, in marketing. Before I decided to make the gift to the Met, I asked them all if they had any interest in this, and they looked at me like I was crazy, so I thought, “What will happen to these beautiful things?”

There was no doubt in mind the Met has the best staff to take care of all my babies when they are away at permanent summer camp, and the broadest, best audience for them. I very much did not want them to end up at auction sold to some socialite who would buy them, and alter them to wear once to a party, and then get rid of them.

Q: How do you feel?

A: This is very emotional for me. These pieces have been a part of my life almost my entire life. They are a part of my family. I’m sad and happy simultaneously. I’m sad my husband is not here to see this happen. But I’ve had no qualms about my decision. I wrote two books about fashion and the movies, and each one started with the same line: “When I grow up, I’m going to be a movie star.” Now, thanks to the Met, I think I’m well on my way.

Q: What are you going to wear to the opening?

A: I haven’t made a decision! It’s going to be very difficult. Maybe I’ll pretend it’s a wedding and change three times.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/fashion/costume-institute-exhibition-couture.html" id="36a3bd2c-5415-3482-a30a-f303726cb999">The New York Times</a>.

The Met's Next Big Fashion Show Comes From One Little-Known Woman

Back in the middle of the last century, Sandy Schreier would come once a year to New York from Detroit, her hometown, and wander around the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her husband, Sherwin.

Though his birth year was a matter of some dispute, Lagerfeld, who lived in Paris, was generally thought to be 85. His death was announced by Chanel, with which he had long been associated.

“More than anyone I know, he represents the soul of fashion: restless, forward-looking and voraciously attentive to our changing culture,” Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, said of Lagerfeld when presenting him with the Outstanding Achievement Award at the British Fashion Awards in 2015.

Creative director of Chanel since 1983 and Fendi since 1965, and founder of his own line, Lagerfeld was the definition of a fashion polyglot, able to speak the language of many different brands at the same time (not to mention many languages themselves: He read in English, French, German and Italian).

In his 80s, when most of his peers were retiring to their yachts or country estates, he was designing an average of 14 new collections a year, ranging from couture to the high street — and not counting collaborations and special projects. “Ideas come to you when you work,” he said backstage before a Fendi show at age 83.

His signature combinations of “high fashion and high camp” attracted admirers like Rihanna; Princess Caroline of Monaco; Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund; and Julianne Moore.

Lagerfeld was also a photographer, whose work was exhibited at the Pinacothèque de Paris; a publisher, having founded his own imprint for Steidl, Edition 7L; and the author of a popular 2002 diet book, “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet,” about how he had lost 92 pounds.

His greatest calling, however, was as the orchestrator of his own myth.

A self-identified “caricature,” with his dark glasses, powdered ponytail, black jeans, fingerless gloves, starched collars, Chrome Hearts jewelry and obsessive Diet Coke consumption, he achieved such a level of global fame — and controversy — that a $200 Karl Barbie doll, created in collaboration with the toymaker Mattel, sold out in less than an hour in 2014.

He was variously referred to as a “genius,” the “kaiser” and “overrated.” His contribution to fashion was not in creating a new silhouette, as designers like Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel herself did.

Rather, he created a new kind of designer: the shape-shifter.

That is to say, he was the creative force who lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its sartorial semiology and then pulls it into the present with a healthy dose of disrespect and a dollop of pop culture.

Not that he put it that way exactly. What he said was: “Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore — and then you get something out of her.”

This approach has become almost quotidian in the industry, but before Lagerfeld was hired at Chanel, when the brand was fading into staid irrelevance kept aloft on a raft of perfume and cosmetics, it was a new and startling idea.

That he dared act on it, and then kept doing so with varying degrees of success for decades, transformed not only the fortunes of Chanel (now said to have revenues of more than $4 billion a year) but also his own profile.

And it cleared a new path for designers who came after, from Tom Ford (who likewise transformed Gucci) to John Galliano (Dior), Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy, Burberry) and Tomas Maier (Bottega Veneta).

A ‘Fashion Phenomenon’

Those who wanted to dismiss Lagerfeld referred to him as a “styliste”: a designer who creates his looks by repurposing what already exists, as opposed to inventing anything new. But he rejected the idea of fashion-as-art, and the designer-as-tortured genius. His goal was more opportunistic.

“I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon,” he once said.

Indeed, his output as a designer was rivaled only by his outpourings as a master of the telling aphorism — so much so that his quotations were collected in a book, “The World According to Karl,” in 2013.

Some choice excerpts: “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat,” and “I’m very much down to earth. Just not this earth.”

Whether his statements were true was immaterial (anyway, it was conceptually true, or true at that moment). The truth could be a fungible concept to Lagerfeld, who was fond of taking creative license with the past. Sources have differed on his birth year, for example: Was it 1938, as Chanel believed, or 1933, as a book by writer Alicia Drake asserted? Or was it 1935, as he told the magazine Paris Match in 2013? (The Hamburg Genealogical Society says he was born on Sept. 10, 1935.)

His personal proclivities were a constantly mutating collection of decades, people and disciplines. His one great fear was of being bored. His conversations (or monologues) could, in almost one breath, bounce from Anita Ekberg romping in the Trevi fountain, to how rich women in the 1920s slept under ermine sheets, and then to the Danish fairy tale illustrator Kay Nielsen. His one blind spot was his own mortality, which he refused to acknowledge.

As he said in the 2008 documentary “Lagerfeld Confidential”: “I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.”

Karl-Otto Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg to Otto Lagerfeld, a well-off managing director of the German branch of the American Milk Products Co., and the former Elisabeth Bahlmann. His mother was Otto’s second wife, and Karl had both an older half sister, Thea, and an older sister, Martha Christiane.

His mother was, by all accounts, the single most formative influence on her precocious son, who often reported that he had disliked his childhood. His father moved his family to a small town in the north of Germany during World War II, and Karl, who was given to wearing a formal suit and tie to school, did not exactly fit in.

“When I was 14 I wanted to smoke because my mother smoked like mad,” he was quoted as saying. “But my mother said: ‘You shouldn’t smoke. Your hands are not that beautiful, and that shows when you smoke.'”

She was responsible, he said, for his fast-forward manner of speech and voluminous conversational references. In an onstage interview at Lincoln Center in 2013, he told actress Jessica Chastain that when his mother had asked a question, he “had to answer quickly, and it had to be funny.”

“If I thought of something to say 10 minutes later,” he said, “she would slap me.”

Karl escaped to Paris as a teenager, and though he did not go to art school or receive a classic fashion education, he entered, in 1954 at age 18, a fashion competition called the International Wool Secretariat (now reborn as the International Woolmark Prize) and won the coat category; Yves Saint Laurent, also a young designer, won in the dress category that year.

Lagerfeld was hired at the couture house of Pierre Balmain and remained there for three years until he left for Jean Patou. He stayed at that house for five years, until deciding to trade the more rarefied environs of the couture for a freelance career in the emerging world of 1960s ready-to-wear.

He went on to do freelance design work for Krizia, Ballantyne, Charles Jourdan and Chloé, where he stayed for over 10 years and became close to the founder, Gaby Aghion, developing his trademark irreverence for style’s sacred cows.

The approach could also be seen at Fendi, starting in the mid-1960s when Lagerfeld was brought in by the family to transform the brand from boring bourgeois furrier into hip fashion name.

And Now, ‘Fun Fur’

He refused to treat such luxury pelts as mink and sable too preciously. Instead, he shaved them, dyed them, tufted them and otherwise created the concept of “Fun Fur,” which gave the brand its enduring double F logo.

Silvia Fendi, the only member of the third generation still engaged with the brand, said that even as a child, “when Karl came,” she knew “something special was going on and I should pay attention.”

He also started collecting: furniture, books, magazines — even apartments. He would delve deep into decades and their aesthetic movements, from Art Deco to Memphis, the Bauhaus to the Space Age, and then discard them, auctioning off his carefully curated acquisitions without nostalgia or emotion. (It was a characteristic of his personal relationships, too, according to those who knew him).

Lagerfeld left Chloé in 1982 and took on Chanel — returning first to the haute couture, and the next year to ready-to-wear. It proved an alchemic combination of designer and brand, given the house’s rich iconography (ropes of pearls, camellias, bouclé, Cs), which Lagerfeld treated like toys that were his for the twisting.

A photograph of the original supermodels — Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington — as a motorcycle gang in pastel colored Chanel bouclé minisuits and biker caps captured his iconoclasm. Women were breaking glass ceilings and refusing to play by the old rules, and Lagerfeld transformed Chanel into the armor they could wear to do it.

His work so clearly expressed the ethos of the moment that his early “muse,” model Ines de la Fressange, was later chosen as the model for a new bust of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic — at which point Lagerfeld, incensed at the idea of having to share her, ended their professional relationship. (They made up years later.)

Celebrities flocked to Chanel and Lagerfeld, who seized on the marketing possibilities. He teamed up with movie director Baz Luhrmann and actress Nicole Kidman to make short promotional films; Lagerfeld later directed actresses Cara Delevingne and Kristen Stewart and singer Pharrell Williams in his own minifeatures about Chanel.

As social media exploded, Lagerfeld understood early on how widely disseminated images had the power to transform a show for the trade into a show that would resonate in the digital wilderness. He trucked in a 265-ton iceberg from Sweden for one collection, and built an airplane hangar, a brasserie and a supermarket (stocked with Chanel dishwasher powder and Chanel pasta) for others, all in the confines of the Grand Palais, his Parisian presentation venue of choice.

A Cat in the Lap of Luxury

While his professional life became ever grander, however, his personal life remained a mystery. Lagerfeld lived alone in a Left Bank apartment crowded with books and clothes, sharing it only with a Birman cat called Choupette, who became as famous as her master, with her own maids, pillow, diamond necklaces and Instagram account. He estimated his library at 300,000 volumes, and he told Susannah Frankel of the British newspaper The Independent that he had more than a thousand of his signature white Hilditch &amp; Key shirts.

He traveled with an ever-shifting entourage, though his godson, Hudson Kroenig, was something of a constant in recent years. Hudson’s father is Brad Kroenig, one of Lagerfeld’s favorite male models (Lagerfeld used to accessorize his Chanel shows with the occasional man), and Hudson would often appear on the runway with his godfather to take a bow.

Ironically, though he started his own brand in 1984, the Lagerfeld line never found the same success or popularity as Chanel and Fendi, leading naysayers to suggest that Lagerfeld worked best within the framework of someone else’s vision. His partisans said he simply did not have enough time. (His brand changed ownership a few times; investors included PVH, Apax Partners and Tommy Hilfiger.)

Though rumors often circulated that Lagerfeld was sick and about to retire, he never did. He had a lifetime contract with both Chanel and Fendi, and he exercised it. If he stopped, he would say when asked, he might as well stop breathing.

Lagerfeld was responsible for so many shows, stores and events that in 2017, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, awarded him the city’s highest honor, the Medal of the City of Paris, for services to the metropolis.

Toward the end of his career, fashion was troubled by questions over whether it was demanding too much of its designers, but Lagerfeld had no truck with any complaints.

“Please don’t say I work hard,” he said to Frankel of The Independent. “Nobody is forced to do this job, and if they don’t like it, they should do another one. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta.”

His pretensions were not to the eternal, but to the ephemeral. In the end, however, with the personal brand that was Karl Lagerfeld, he may have achieved both.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/obituaries/karl-lagerfeld-dead.html" id="253f41f4-3b60-3c01-afe6-b70c2d55b9ca">The New York Times</a>.

Karl Lagerfeld, Designer Who Defined Luxury Fashion, Dies at 85

Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific designer of the 20th and 21st centuries and a man whose career formed the prototype of the modern luxury fashion industry, died Tuesday in Paris.

His death was announced by Chanel, with which he had long been associated.

Whether his statements were true was immaterial (anyway, it was conceptually true, or true at that moment). The truth could be a fungible concept to Lagerfeld, who was fond of taking creative license with the past. His birth year, for example, was a matter of some dispute: was it 1938, as Chanel believed, or 1933, as a book by the writer Alicia Drake asserted? Or was it 1935, as he told the magazine Paris Match in 2013? (The Hamburg Genealogical Society says he was born on Sept. 10, 1935.)

Introducing ‘Fun Fur’

Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific designer of the 20th and 21st centuries and a man whose career formed the prototype of the modern luxury fashion industry, died Tuesday in Paris. He was 85.

His death was announced Tuesday by Chanel.

In his 80s, when most of his peers were retiring to their yachts or country estates, he was designing an average of 14 new collections a year ranging from couture to the high street, and not counting collaborations and special projects. His signature combinations of “high fashion and high camp” attracted Rihanna; Princess Caroline of Monaco; Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; and Julianne Moore.

“Ideas come to you when you work,” he said backstage before a Fendi show at age 83. As a result, Lagerfeld never stopped creating. He was also a photographer, whose work was exhibited at the Pinacothèque de Paris; a publisher, having founded his own imprint for Steidl, Edition 7L; and the author of a popular 2002 diet book, “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet,” about how he had lost 92 pounds.

That is to say, the creative force who lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its sartorial semiology and then wresting it into the present with a healthy dose of disrespect and a dollop of pop culture.

That he dared act on it, and then kept doing so with varying degrees of success for decades, transformed not only the fortunes of Chanel (now said to have revenues of over $4 billion a year) but also his own profile.

Karl escaped to Paris as a teenager, and though he did not go to art school or receive a classic fashion education, in 1954 at age 18 he entered a fashion competition called the International Wool Secretariat (now reborn as the International Woolmark Prize) and won the coat category; Yves Saint Laurent, also a young designer, won in the dress category that year.

Lagerfeld was hired at the couture house of Pierre Balmain and remained for three years until he left for Jean Patou. He stayed at that house for five years, until deciding to trade the more rarefied environs of the couture for a freelance career in the emerging world of 1960s ready-to-wear.

The approach could also been seen at Fendi, starting in the mid-1960s when Lagerfeld was brought in by the family to transform the brand from boring bourgeois furrier into hip fashion name.

He refused to treat luxury pelts such as mink and sable too preciously. Instead, he shaved them, dyed them, tufted them and otherwise created the concept of “Fun Fur,” which gave the brand its enduring double F logo.

He also started collecting: furniture, books, magazines — even apartments. He would delve deep into decades and their aesthetic movements, from Art Deco to Memphis, the Bauhaus to the Space Age, and then discard them, auctioning off his carefully curated acquisitions without nostalgia or emotion (a characteristic of his personal relationships, too, according to those who knew him).

His work so clearly expressed the ethos of the moment that Lagerfeld’s early “muse,” model Ines de la Fressange, was later chosen as the model for a new bust of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic — at which point Lagerfeld, incensed at the idea of having to share her, ended their professional relationship (though years later they made up).

Celebrities flocked to Chanel and Lagerfeld, who seized on the marketing possibilities. He teamed up with director Baz Luhrmann and actress Nicole Kidman to make short promotional films, later directing Kristen Stewart and the singer Pharrell Williams in his own minifeatures about Chanel.

While his professional life became ever grander, however, his personal life remained a mystery. Lagerfeld lived alone — with a Birman cat called Choupette, who became as famous as her master, with her own maids, pillow, diamond necklaces and Instagram account — in a Left Bank apartment crowded with books and clothes. At Lincoln Center, he estimated his library at 300,000 volumes. He told Susannah Frankel of the British newspaper The Independent that he had more than a thousand of his signature white Hilditch &amp; Key shirts.

He traveled with an ever-shifting entourage, though his godson, Hudson Kroenig, was something of a constant in recent years. Son of one of Lagerfeld’s favorite male models, Brad Kroenig ( Lagerfeld used to accessorize his Chanel shows with the occasional man), Hudson would often appear on the runway with Lagerfeld to take a bow.

Ironically, though he started his own brand in 1984, the Lagerfeld line never found the same success or popularity as Chanel and Fendi, leading naysayers to suggest that Lagerfeld worked best within the framework of someone else’s vision; his partisans said he simply did not have enough time. (His brand changed ownership a few times; investors included PVH, Apax Partners and Tommy Hilfiger.)

<h1>When was it decided that to be taken seriously as an actress, you need to dress in serious couture? I’m asking because I never got the memo, but clearly, Lady Gaga and her styling team did.</h1>

How else to explain her transformation, as she has embarked on the “A Star Is Born” awards trail, from an unpredictable, experimental fashion iconoclast who didn’t believe in pants to a well-behaved brand ambassador in giant periwinkle Valentino, pure white Dior, Camelot-ready Alexander McQueen and silver Celine, each time accessorized with hundreds of carats of diamonds?

Even in the context of high-fashion fashion, she’s playing it awfully safe. It is possible, after all, to go high-end and high-concept at the same time. Designers do some eccentric stuff. Consider, for example, the Armani dress she wore to the 2010 Grammys, with an entire orbital system rotating around it, which gave new meaning to the phrase “out there.”

It is, of course, entirely Gaga’s right to mutate every few years into a new persona, both artistically and stylistically. In fact, such mutation is part of her identity. This is, after all, the woman who once emerged from a giant egg at the Grammys. She claimed to have been marinating inside it for approximately three days.

And to be fair, her fashionization has probably been coming for awhile. We should have seen it coming when she accepted the 2016 Golden Globe for best actress in a limited series for her role in “American Horror Story,” wearing Marilyn Monroe-esque black velvet Versace.

In some ways you can trace the evolution of her dress in the evolution of her career, from underground superstar to actor, and also, the evolution of her stylists. There were her early shock-factor years with Nicola Formichetti (he later became creative director of Diesel and now has his own line); her more classic bombshell period with Brandon Maxwell, who put her in a lot of Alaïa and with her encouragement also opened his own brand (he has a real thing for old Hollywood); and now, Sandra Amador and Tom Eerebout.

But I can’t believe I am the only one who feels like this particular pupal stage — Gaga, the Hollywood royalty version — is a little less inspiring, a little more mundane, and definitely less complicated than the others. She looks good, no question. Glamorous. But she also looks just like everyone else: a cog in the carpet marketing machine.

Maybe we should chalk it up to growing up. It’s not fair to demand our superstars remain rebels forever. It’s probably not even possible.

And yet. And yet. I find myself waxing nostalgic about those weird horn implants she had for awhile under her skin. I miss the crazy hoof-like shoes. I never thought I would say that, but there you go. Once upon an Oscars we, the watching public, thought Bjork and her famous swan dress were as wild as it was going to get, but just imagine what early Gaga could have done with current Gaga’s red carpet moments. The mind boggles.

Also, just imagine what Ryan Seacrest would have done with any of those particular fashion moments. They might actually have rendered him speechless. Which would have been a small step for one woman, and a big step for womankind.

Would appearing in her erstwhile eye-popping outfits have jeopardized Gaga’s chances at an Oscar, or those of her film? Maybe. They could have offended an interest group (PETA), which could have hurt the box office and swayed the Academy. They could have become the story, when she wanted her tale to be about talent. They could have been an unproductive distraction. So perhaps the classic choices are the diplomatic choices. (Not that toeing the party line has equated to more or less success for the film.)

And they would certainly have been an irresistible dare to the doyennes of the worst-dressed lists, and landing on those probably isn’t much fun. Except of all people, Gaga never seemed to care too much about such bourgeois concerns. That was part of the point of her: other people’s worst-dressed lists were her best-loved teachable moment. By embracing her own weirdness and pushing the limits of “acceptable” and “societal” she gave everyone else, all her little monsters, permission to do so, too. She could have done the same for her new silver-screen peers, now.

Gaga could have helped them break the yolk, which everyone says lies so heavy on their shoulders, of red carpet conformity. Forced us all to wrestle with our own preconceptions about what beauty and stardom really means. Helped fashion expand its own thinking. Challenged the status quo instead of pandering to it. Proved with a wink that her most recent incarnation was simply a character she had played to perfection (give her an award for that!).

Because the thing is, if she is to be believed, she wasn’t born this way.

This article originally appeared in <a id="eaf393f0-72f9-44d1-b585-00d263a9d448" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/style/lady-gaga-oscars-red-carpet-dress-necklace.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Visual History of Lady Gaga on the Red Carpet

Even in the context of high-fashion fashion, she’s playing it awfully safe. It is possible, after all, to go high-end and high-concept at the same time.

A visual history of Lady Gaga on the red carpet

<h1>Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific designer of the 20th and 21st centuries and a man whose career formed the prototype of the modern luxury fashion industry, died Tuesday in Paris.</h1>

Though his birth year was a matter of some dispute, Lagerfeld, who lived in Paris, was generally thought to be 85. His death was announced Tuesday by Chanel, with which he had long been associated.

This article originally appeared in <a id="acc0bc32-9bcd-4b09-a936-2bd6d88aab80" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/obituaries/karl-lagerfeld-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Though his birth year was a matter of some dispute, Lagerfeld, who lived in Paris, was generally thought to be 85. His death was announced Tuesday by Chanel, with which he had long been associated.

Karl Lagerfeld, designer who defined luxury fashion, dies at 85

<h1>Alex Bolen, the chief executive of Oscar de la Renta, planned to have his new store in Paris open around this week, just in time for the couture shows. He planned to have a presence in the city even if he did not have a show. He had it all figured out.</h1>

Then, last summer, in the middle of renovations, Bolen got a call from his architect, Nathalie Ryan.

“'We made a discovery,'” he remembered her saying. On the other end of the phone, Bolen cringed. The last time he received a call like that about a store, their plans to move a wall had to be scrapped because of fears the building would collapse. He asked what, exactly, the discovery was.

“You have to come and see,” she told him.

So, gritting his teeth, he got on a plane from New York. Ryan took him to the second floor of what would be the shop, where workers were busily clearing out detritus, and gestured toward the end of the space. Bolen, she said, blinked. Then he said: “No, it’s not possible.”

Something had been hidden behind a wall, and it was not asbestos. It was a 10-by-20-foot oil painting of an elaborately coifed and dressed 17th-century marquis and assorted courtiers entering the city of Jerusalem.

“It’s very rare and exceptional, for many reasons,” said Benoît Janson, of the restoration specialists Nouvelle Tendance, who is overseeing work on the canvas. Namely, “its historical and aesthetic quality and size.”

Boutique renovations, like most renovations, are often delayed. They frequently run over budget. But rarely are they delayed and over budget because a mysterious artwork more than three centuries old has resurfaced.

In the arms race for the most unique! most authentic! store underway, when only-in-person experience is what differentiates retail from e-tail, a cultural treasure surrounded by a puzzle straight out of a Dan Brown novel may be the ultimate accessory.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Bolen had looked for a store in Paris for a long time. In the early 1990s, the company had a small boutique in the city during de la Renta’s tenure as couturier of Balmain, but the boutique closed after he left the brand in 2002. (He died in 2014.)

In 2017, Bolen was offered the former Reed Krakoff store on Rue de Marignan, a diagonal side street off the luxury thoroughfare Avenue Montaigne, which terminates on one end at L’Avenue, the high-fashion canteen.

Bolen liked the location, and the building, which had been built in the 19th century and remained largely in the hands of one family, many of whom still lived in the upstairs apartments. Still, he wanted a larger site, and when the office space that spanned the second floor became available, he grabbed it.

“It was pretty charmless,” he said. A former insurance brokerage, it had a dropped ceiling with fluorescent lighting, particleboard walls and industrial carpeting in its rabbit warren of offices. “We knew we’d have to take everything out,” Bolen said.

The idea was to link the two floors with a grand staircase. The ground floor and part of the second would serve as the boutique, and a room at the end would be used as a showroom and event space, with other space for offices and storage.

The interior, designed by Jeang Kim and Will Kim of Oro Studio, would feel less like a big white box than a home for “young people who had just moved into their grandmother’s grand apartment,” according to Jeang Kim (who is also the sister of Oscar de la Renta’s co-creative director Laura Kim; she is not related to Will Kim).

Not long after the demolition began, a discovery was made. A workman, tearing down the dropped ceiling in the last room on the second floor, said there was something “strange.”

That would be a paneled ceiling that had been underneath the visible one, composed of 29 inset squares, eight of them painted with different heraldic seals, and a central diamond. Dating from the mid-19th-century, they were well preserved since they had been recessed within the coffers of the ceiling.

Still, while that was an interesting reveal, it was not unprecedented in a building of that age. It was when workers began removing the particleboard along the side and a chunk of the wall came off, too, that things got very interesting.

“Oh my God, it was — wow,” said Ryan, who was the in-house architect for Dior for many years and opened her own company, Kirei Studio, in 2010.

Behind the wall a single painting, dark with age, ran from end to end. “Sometimes when you work on castles, you find something, but usually it’s a hidden fireplace, or in Italy, maybe a fresco,” Ryan said. “But in an apartment? In a store?” She had never seen anything like it.

“Everyone freaked out,” Jeang Kim said. “It was like finding a mummy. I turned off my phone immediately and just looked at it. Nothing like this had ever happened in my work before.”

Demolition was halted to figure out what the painting was and how it came to be in what was about to be a shop. Seeing the aristocrats on horseback and the mosque in the picture, Bolen said, visions of Crusaders and Knights Templar began to dance in his head.

“I think maybe I have seen too many movies,” he said.

In the game of six degrees of separation, this was a good one: Bolen’s mother-in-law, Annette de la Renta, had cousins (via her mother, Jane Engelhard) who had married into the de La Rochefoucauld family, storied members of the French aristocracy. One of those family members happened to live across the street from the new de la Renta boutique.

So when the painting was found, and it became clear Bolen would have to talk to the building’s owners, whom he had never met (the lease had been negotiated through a broker), his relative was able to make the introductions. Another de La Rochefoucauld, who happened to work at the Louvre, got a recommendation for an art historian: Stephane Pinta of the Cabinet Turquin, an expert in old-master paintings.

Pinta determined that the painting was an oil on canvas created in 1674 by Arnould de Vuez, a painter who worked with Charles Le Brun, the first painter to Louis XIV and designer of interiors of the Château de Versailles. After working with Le Brun, de Vuez, who was known for getting involved in duels of honor, was forced to flee France and ended up in Constantinople.

Pinta traced the painting to a plate that was reproduced in the 1900 book “Odyssey of an Ambassador: The Travels of the Marquis de Nointel, 1670-1680" by Albert Vandal, which told the story of the travels of Charles-Marie-François Olier, Marquis de Nointel et d’Angervilliers, Louis XIV’s ambassador to the Ottoman Court. On Page 129, there is a rotogravure of an artwork depicting the Marquis de Nointel arriving in Jerusalem with great pomp and circumstance — the painting on the wall.

But how it ended up glued to that wall, no one knew, nor why it was covered up. There was speculation that maybe it happened during World War II, given the setting. It could be “a fog-of-war issue,” Bolen said.

What everyone did know was that it would be dangerous to move because of how the painting had been attached to the wall: backed by gauze and glued on. And, Bolen said, his wife, Eliza, told him, “If you move that painting, you will have 100 years of bad luck.” He thought she was probably right.

Instead, Bolen reached an agreement with the building’s owners: He would restore the painting if they agreed to let it remain in the store while the store was a tenant (the initial lease is for 10 years). Janson got to work in late November.

“It was very dark because of all the overpaint from earlier restorations and varnish,” Janson said.

For the past two months, a team of three to five people have laboriously swabbed away some of the varnish to allow the colors to come through. They hope to be finished by May, Janson said, though Bolen believes it will be sooner than that. Slowly, details that confirmed the painting’s provenance have begun to emerge: the mosque, the Western Wall, the elaborate brocades of the visiting Frenchmen.

The discovery demanded something of an interior rethink as well as some practical changes. Jeang Kim has been haunting auctions for furniture from different periods to link past to present, including Marcel Breuer chairs and pieces from Pierre Bergé's estate.

“We’re not going to put a wall of dresses in front,” Ryan said. Security will be increased, and the 10 floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor equipped with treated glass. The plan is to open in late spring.

Vanessa Friedman

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A visual history of Lady Gaga on the red carpet

Karl Lagerfeld, designer who defined luxury fashion, dies at 85

The treasure behind the wall