A meditation on the past, as prompted by the mention of Proust:
"My problem is I have no experience. Because I don’t believe in experience.’’ Interviewer: "You have no past?" Lagerfeld: ‘‘Not as far as I remember. For other people, maybe. But personally I make no effort to remember. I like the language in Proust, but not the context. I could say something mean. It’s all — you know — the son of the concierge looking at society people. There was this woman who survived from that group. The wife of a banker, Madame Porgès. They had a huge hôtel particulier in front of the Plaza Athénée hotel, where LVMH is now. She died a hundred years after everyone else. She was not very chic, and people said, ‘She was the last person who could remember a world she was never part of.’ Some couture designer — to be kind I will not say his name — once said to me he liked Proust because Françoise Sagan coached him in the best passages.’’ When asked if he was referencing Yves Saint Laurent: ‘‘There was a moment when designers draped in ermine would be reading Proust, or pretending to.’’ The shade!
More on why he doesn't dwell on the past:
‘‘One day it will be over and I don’t care. As my mother used to say, ‘There is one God for everybody and all the religions are shops.’ ’’ His mother read constantly, he said. ‘‘I remember her being on the couch reading and telling other people what to do. ... I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.’’
On Therapy:
‘‘What for? To get back to normality? I don’t want to be normal.’’
On his ideal of a perfect woman today:
‘‘Julianne Moore. I don’t know [why]. I just think she’s great. Her whole life; the way she is in life. And Jessica Chastain — she’s great, too. Of the younger generation, I love Kristen Stewart. She is gifted. She looks tough but in fact she’s the nicest person in the world.’’
On Feminism:
‘‘I was taught it as a child, not to overestimate the importance of men. My mother was interested in the history of feminism. And in my childhood I heard about Hedwig Dohm, a German-Jewish feminist who was a writer in Berlin. The rights of women in Germany in the 1870s were limited to the Three Ks — Küche, Kirche and Kinder — the kitchen, the church and the children. Her granddaughter Katia later married Thomas Mann. Nobody remembers. People remember the English suffragettes but the first to care about women’s rights was Hedwig Dohm.’’
Read the entire exquisite interview at The New York Times.
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