Karl Lagerfeld played the role of flamboyant in fashion up to the hilt.
The former Chanel designer, hair pulled back into a powdery white ponytail, ring-adorned fingers, tossed off sullenly. Good words his enemy friends, ruthlessly cut ties with faithful friends, and lived in astonishing opulence. (His cat of his had two servants.)
When she died in 2019 at the age of 85, fashion commentators either mourned or celebrated the end of an era.
“Paradise Now,” a new biography of the designer by William Middleton (Harper), revels in Lagerfeld’s larger-than-life personality.
The “kaiser” of fashion often resembled a caricature more than a real person; he didn’t like showing vulnerability to him.
Except when it came to Jacques de Bascher.
Jacques de Bascher, a minor aristocrat with an enormous passion for life, was Lagerfeld’s partner for 18 years.
This “devil incarnate with the face of Garbo” burst onto the Parisian fashion scene in the 1970s, leaving a path of decadent destruction in his wake.
He kept his silk ties in a ribbon box that had belonged to Marie Antoinette and his cocaine in a gold deco Cartier container.
He threw wild tantrums where shirtless firefighters danced and revelers made lines from a pristine Harley-Davidson in the middle of his living room. (De Bascher once bragged that his bicycle was “the most expensive cocaine mirror in Paris.”)
He looked like a 1930s movie star, with his hazel eyes and pencil-thin mustache, and he slept with both men and women.
He was once pulled over by a Paris policeman for riding a motorcycle without a helmet. De Bascher “passed him his business card, invited him to drink some of his family’s wine, and ended up sleeping” with the police officer, Middleton writes.
After De Bascher became involved with Lagerfeld, 19 years his senior, the delinquent dandy seduced Karl’s rival, Yves Saint Laurent, sparking one of the most sensational scandals in fashion history.
Yet “Paradise Now” explores the softer side of their relationship: he was Lagerfeld’s ultimate muse, a behind-the-scenes fixture at Chloé and later Chanel, entertaining the seamstresses with his goofy charm.
(Lagerfeld long insisted the relationship was non-sexual, calling their love “absolute, carefree and light, because it’s not based on f-king,” though some friends didn’t believe the two had ever had sex.)
The two stayed together until 1989, when de Bascher died of AIDS.
“He was the person who amused me the most,” Lagerfeld said later. “It was also impossible, despicable, he was perfect.”
De Bascher first met Lagerfeld in 1972 at a small Parisian club.
The 39-year-old designer was making a splash with his designs for Italian furrier Fendi and chic French label Chloé.
De Bascher, 20, approached him dressed in what appeared to be a “The Sound of Music” costume: “long suede shorts held up with suspenders, a traditional white shirt and, in the middle of his chest, a carved cameo.” on deer antler.”
“I’d like to meet you,” the handsome Bascher said to the older designer.
The two ended up talking until 5 am.
De Bascher was born in July 1951 in Saigon. The fourth of five children, he spent his early years in Vietnam, then under French rule, where his father worked as a government administrator.
His family returned to France in 1955, to a suburb of Paris. After doing his mandatory military service, as a librarian aboard the warship L’Orage — landed in the City of Lights, determined to conquer the social scene there.
When she first saw Lagerfeld, walking into a nightclub with her stunning crew of models, in 1971, she decided to make him her boyfriend.
Lagerfeld was fascinated by this louche dandy with an aristocratic family. (Never mind that de Bascher exaggerated his ancestry.)
Even so, the designer quickly settled de Bascher in a new apartment and financed his increasingly extravagant lifestyle.
In return, de Bascher gave him his youth, his beauty, his energy, his stories of debauchery.
She also hosted fashion week parties for him, like the notorious 1977 Moratoire Noire, held in a cavernous nightclub on the outskirts of Paris. The party – dress code: “tragic outfit, black” – shocked way you when it turned into an orgy.
De Bascher has become a fashion legend for her fling with Saint Laurent, circa 1974, when Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent were friendly rivals.
The romance lasted no more than six months, Middleton claims, but Saint Laurent fell head over heels in love.
He flooded de Bascher’s apartment with white lilies and begged on his knees to be let in.
He kept a photo of De Bascher in his jacket pocket and “[rub] back and forth over his heart,” yelling, “I’m crazy about him!”
Eventually, Saint Laurent’s lover and business partner intervened, essentially cutting off all contact between the couturier and the entire Lagerfeld team, blaming them all for Yves’ descent into hard drugs, sadomasochism, and insanity.
Yet even after this brief betrayal, Lagerfeld never cut de Bascher out of his life, as he did so many others.
Throughout his life, Lagerfeld honed a mask of frivolous cruelty, refusing to acknowledge disease, death, or ugliness of any kind.
But in 1984, de Bascher tested positive for HIV. He continued to sit front row at Chanel and go to parties, but he looked increasingly haggard.
Lagerfeld tried in vain to save his life, paying for the best doctors and care, but in the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence.
When De Bascher could no longer get out of his hospital bed, Lagerfeld slept in his hospital room on a cot.
De Bascher died in 1989, at the age of 35, in the arms of Lagerfeld. Later that day, he went to work at Chanel for a fitting, but his friends said he was never the same.
“It was the only thing that made sense of things,” Lagerfeld said three years later.
“He brought a kind of glow to my life that no one else will ever bring. Maybe there’s one person in life for you and that’s it.”