chanelpurses

One of Lagerfeld's Chanel Store passions is German posters. He's seen here holding a 1913 Doyen cigarette post by Paul Scheurich, with pieces by Walter Schnackenberg behind him.Karl Lagerfeld is famously a man of many parts: a Hamburg-born fashion icon whose vision of modernity is still revitalizing the legendary French house of Chanel after 25 years, an art photographer whose recent pictures of the Chateau de Versailles’s park in winter evoke almost human emotions from the stone statuary and an instinctive connoisseur who has outfitted a plethora of homes in such spots as Hamburg, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, Rome and Paris with the finest examples of “things I like,” including 18th-century French furniture, Old Master paintings and Art Deco and Memphis design items Chanel 2013 . Lagerfeld’s deftness with decor has made him an avant-garde trendsetter with a wide following. His influence is reflected in the prices his collections command when sold at auction, often fetching two or three times the estimates.One of Lagerfeld’s latest projects is the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, a traveling contemporary-art show that he conceived as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Chanel handbag and whose exhibition space he commissioned the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Zaha Hadid to design. For the pavilion’s first stops, in Hong Kong and Tokyo, French curator Fabrice Bousteau chose original installations inspired by the emblematic purse and created by 20 contemporary artists, including Nobuyoshi Araki, from Japan; Blue Noses, from Russia; Daniel Buren and Sophie Calle, from France; Subodh Gupta, from India; and David Levinthal, from the United States. On October 20, the show swoops into New York’s Central Park, where it will remain until November 9. Next year it will travel to London and Moscow, finishing up in Paris in 2010.Jean Bond Rafferty caught up with Lagerfeld in the Chanel Price studio on Paris’s Rue Cambon. He was putting the final touches on the 2008–09 couture collection but took the time to reveal the raison d’être of the Lagerfeld lifestyle.

You are working at a Jean Prouvé desk. We are sitting on Prouvé chairs.? When did you discover his designs?You know, I bought Prouvé 20 years ago, when nobody wanted him. These were made for a school. I also have a set of 40 chairs and 10 tables from his first known public work, for the Crédit Lyonnais bank. I bought them for nearly nothing from a very good dealer, Anne Sophie Duval, who unfortunately just died. Now people ask me for a chair, and I give them as gifts. Are you always way ahead of the curve?The biggest, most beautiful classic paintings—by Impressionists, by Surrealists (whom I hate), by Expressionists (whom I have) and even modern art, like Pollock—were not expensive when they were made. Now you buy them for a fortune, and you have only a few excuses, or no excuse [for waiting]: You didn’t have the money to buy even cheaply 30 years ago, or you are an idiot and you are blind.chanel handbags usa Or you like the idea of putting something on the wall and everybody knows how much you paid for it. It’s up to you to adjust to the period. You can fight for the past, or like me, you can be a healthy opportunist and go to the next step. You move on quickly.I hope so. I’m a fashion person. I change clothes, furniture, houses, collections. Life is about change. There is a moment when things cannot become any better; then you change. There is no feeling of home in my house. I don’t have those feelings. I am utterly free, European, free-minded, and I have no sense of possession. But to have no sense of possession is easier if you have owned a lot. You keep nothing when you sell these things?I keep things like a joke, the furniture of my childhood home. That’s your Rosebud, à la Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane?In a way. I’ve kept the pieces, but I don’t use them. They are too tiny for me Chanel Bags 2012 . It’s a very beautiful set of Biedermeier furniture—the desk where I learned how to write and how to sketch, even the paintings my mother put there that weren’t good enough for her, the leftovers, the German Romantic paintings. How do you live with your art?I had beautiful Old Master paintings; I sold them all. But now I have a collection—it’s not on the wall—that I really love, of German posters from 1905 to 1915. They are the beginning of modern advertising, like huge Pop-art paintings, with unbelievable colors and modernity. They show the strangest products: AEG electrical equipment, coal, chocolate, sometimes fairs, or exhibitions. But they are divine, and they are impossible to find. Where do you find them?I get all the catalogues, and I have people who buy for me. The other day, one of them said, “You cannot pay $50,000 for a poster chanel 2012 .” I bought it for nearly $80,000, and a week after, at a sale in New York, a poster by the same artist—not as good—went for $120,000. But you don’t hang them on the wall.I want to put them in my place in New York. They don’t work in France; it’s not a French style at all.? I will do the New York apartment in the style of the [Deutscher] Werkbund, the architectural movement that had designers like Bruno Paul, Hermann Muthesius and Peter Behrens, who taught Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. They did modern things differently, in 1910, before the Bauhaus. I have a collection of furniture bought 20 years ago that is stunning, very colorful, in bright red, yellow, green and gold. Suddenly people are discovering Werkbund. Everyone knows Vienna Secession, but there is not much left. Werkbund is Germany for me, a Germany that I can identify with. Why did you choose these things for chanel usa New York?My apartment is in Gramercy Park. I like it because it’s very German and very New York at the same time—the New York of E. B. White. Your current enthusiasm is contemporary design, the work of people like Marc Newson and Zaha Hadid.I have known them for years. I bought the first piece of furniture Zaha ever made, for Sawaya & Moroni—a sofa 5.5 meters long—20 years ago in Milan. If you ask me what genius is, I would say Zaha Hadid. You started collecting Marc Newson at the Galerie Kreo, in Paris.Most of the furniture in my Quai Voltaire apartment is from the well-made limited editions of the artists of Kreo: Marc, the Bouroullec brothers (Erwan and Ronan) and Martin Szekely. Everything Martin does is great.