Becoming Karl Lagerfeld: Miniseries features fashion, culture, sex and characterizations on repeat mode
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B
By the time he died in 2019, Karl Lagerfeld was one of fashion’s most successful designers. And with his signature look, starched white collars, black clothes, tall boots, hair pulled back into a long pony tail and always carrying a lacy black fan, he was one of its most notable characters.
He was also controversial often without apology, (e.g. he declared Heidi Klum too heavy to be a model).
But that success did not come overnight. Becoming Karl Lagerfeld , a six-part mini-series airing on Disney+, aims to do a couple of things. It’s set in the 1970s and the early ‘80s - a pivotal decade in his career - and it attempts to grapple with who the man behind the image might have been both through his work and a personal relationship.
Daniel Brühl and Théodore Pellerin in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld
The dramatization leans on a biography of Lagerfeld called Kaiser Karl: The Life of Karl Lagerfeld by Raphaelle Bacque. At the same time, each episode begins with a disclaimer noting that some of it has been invented for dramatic effect.
This isn’t documentary. The series isn’t a study of his work as a designer, as much as it aims to look at the man and his personal life. Given that it’s a fairly intimate or personal series, the question of how much is true and how much was invented to create drama dogged me as I watched it. When someone isn't around to approve it, how much dramatization is permissible?
It plays much like a soap opera. Having said that, I will say that it benefits from great art direction, costume design and a terrific and very watchable cast.
The wonderful German actor Daniel Brühl stars as Lagerfeld, introduced in the early ‘70s here as one of the designers for the Chloë ready-to-wear label. The German-born Lagerfeld lives with his mother in a beautiful Paris apartment, and is a very serious, some would say humourless, individual. But he is a creative machine when it comes to designs, always drawing, thinking about the ready-to-wear market.
Early on in the series he starts to chafe at being a behind the scenes nameless designer, some of that driven by the success of an old friend, Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois), who is one of the world’s superstar designers It inspires him to recognize his own ambition.
Lagerfeld persuades the head of the Chloë label, Gaby Aghion (Agnès Jaoui) to make him the creative director, which she is most happy to do. She has previously hesitated: She recognizes his talent, but also his restlessness. In some ways, she knows him better than he knows himself.
At the same time Lagerfeld spreads his wings when he can, and that includes taking on an assignment to design for Marlene Dietrich that he tries to leverage to his benefit.
On the personal side, Lagerfeld is wooed by an agressively flirtatious young man named Jacques de Bascher (beautifully played by Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin). De Bascher is highly sexual and adventurous. Lagerfeld is not. In fact, the series suggests that he is romantically drawn to men, but asexual.
Nonetheless, there is something between the two men that sticks. To keep him close, Lagerfeld pays for De Bascher’s apartment, and clothes, but treats him in ways that are detached and sometimes cold. De Bascher is an extroverted partier, part of the Paris disco scene, but he seems to genuinely wants Lagerfeld’s affection. And as the series progresses. it shifts a bit to also focus on De Bascher’s story.
The series also pays attention to the rivalries beween Lagerfeld. Saint Laurent, and his business partner Pierre Bergé (Alex Lutz). Saint Laurent is one of the leading designers in the world . But as the series portays it, Bergé has both been holding the emtionally fragile Saint Laurent together, and has driven a wedge between the two old friends, taking every opportunity to harm Lagerfeld.
This becomes even more complicated when the increasingly unstable Saint Laurent becomes romantically infatuated with De Bascher after a wild fling.
Still, Lagerfeld persists, rarely showing any outward emotion. We see him snap at his mother at times. And a few times there’s a suggestion that he used food as an emotional salve.
Otherwise, it seems that he is fairly joylessly pressing forward, focused on his work, while the people in his life, including his mother, ask him a question that seems to be at the center of what might have held Lagerfeld back professionally: What is your style?
The implication is that Lagerfeld at least for part of the ‘70s, is an excellent designer for hire, with an eye for detail and quality and a belief in what he’s doing. But doesn’t yet have the vision that could turn him into a designer at Saint Laurent’s level.
These are big questions that the series ultimately aims to answer. The ‘70s were a decade where Lagerfeld, in a sense, had to find his groove, or be content with his career and status as it was: working for others, well compensated and able to be creative, but not on his own terms.
There’s a lot going on, and yet the series takes a few episodes to feel like it’s found its feet. And even then, it seems repetitive at times.
That’s partially because once the relationships are set up, everyone seems to sink into their positions: Lagerfeld hyper-focused on building his career, seemingly great to his staff, often canny with his career moves, but in his personal life emotionally controlled to nth degree. De Bascher parties or sulks. Bergé says mean things. Aghion is steady and assuring. Becoming Karl Lagerfeld can feel frustrating and sometimes a bit stagnant.
The series also provides almost no context. We start in the ‘70s with Lagerfeld already at work. But we don’t know much about his background nor his inspirations.
That’s not to say that it isn’t interesting. The performances are strong. And, as it happens, and as history tells us, Lagerfeld does indeed find his groove. The series ends by introducing a key moment in his career in the early ‘80s, which begs the question of whether this series will go to a second season.
The ‘80s was another interesting decade in Lagerfeld’s life, and one where he became a part of the zeitgiest.
If any designer’s work could be presented decade by decade, a case could be made that seeing fashion, culture, sexual politics and the self-created rise of a fashion icon, makes Lagerfeld a worthy subject.
Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. Stars Daniel Brühl, Théodore Pellerin, Agnès Jaoui, Arnaud Valois, Alex Lutz. Streaming on Disney+