THE STORY – The life of Karl Lagerfeld, an internationally renowned fashion designer and cultural icon, is told from start to finish through interviews with close friends, collaborators, and others who knew him.
THE CAST – Karl Lagerfeld, Tilda Swinton, Tom Ford, Penélope Cruz, Lily-Rose Depp & Pamela Picasso
THE TEAM – Nick Hooker (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 118 Minutes
Fashion designers are not typically household names, but Karl Lagerfeld is perhaps the closest there is to an exception. Even if you do not recognize his name, his distinctive features—white ponytail, dark sunglasses, and high-collar shirts—are likely familiar to you. But does anyone honestly know the man behind the fame?
Lagerfeld once claimed he deliberately kept others guessing about who he really was, never allowing anyone to see his true self. The new documentary “Karl,” which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, sets out to fill that gap and reveal the real Lagerfeld to the world. Yet, despite being an engaging film with a few strikingly personal moments, it is ultimately Lagerfeld who retains the upper hand. The film never quite succeeds in piercing the carefully constructed armor of this enigmatic figure.
The story begins much like most biographical documentaries today, with a parade of celebrity admirers. Director Nick Hooker (“Agnelli,” “AKA, Mr. Chow”) enlists Tilda Swinton, Tom Ford, and Penélope Cruz to testify to Lagerfeld’s towering influence on both fashion and culture at large. From there, the film takes us back to his childhood, tracing his evolution in the expected documentary fashion: interviews with collaborators, archival footage and photographs, and occasional appearances by Lagerfeld himself, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 85. One inspired touch is the use of hand-drawn dramatizations of his early life, particularly his fascination with Louis XIV and 18th-century France. However, this imaginative device disappears for most of the two-hour runtime, only resurfacing near the end as the story approaches Lagerfeld’s death.
Born into a wealthy family in Hamburg in 1933, Lagerfeld longed to move to Paris, drawn to French culture and history. His eventual move in the 1950s and his ascent in the fashion world are sketched in, though the film never clearly explains how he rose to prominence, aside from his beginnings as an apprentice and later being retained as the lone survivor in a competitive fashion house. From there, the milestones are ticked off: his years at Chloé, his pivotal revival of Chanel, and his career-defining role as the brand’s creative force.
Details of his personal life are scarcer. The film touches briefly on his sexuality and focuses most intently on his relationship with French socialite Jacques de Bascher, whose death from AIDS in the late 1980s left Lagerfeld devastated. This is one of the few moments where the film shows him as a man rather than as an icon. Later sections highlight his headline-making collaborations, such as his groundbreaking partnership with H&M, and cover his final years, illness, and death. Throughout, a lively soundtrack keeps pace with the shifting decades, offering an added spark.
As a survey of fashion history, “Karl” works beautifully. As an attempt to decode its subject, however, it is less successful. The film reflects Lagerfeld’s own desire to remain unknowable. Interviewees contradict one another endlessly, describing him as enigmatic, kind, charismatic, childish, controlling, serious, playful, full of life, and full of himself. Perhaps he really was all of these things, but the film never shapes the contradictions into a clear portrait.
There are moments of self-awareness that suggest Hooker is in on the joke. Tilda Swinton remarks that Lagerfeld “always had tricks and costumes up his sleeve,” while Tom Ford observes that he was “always playing a fictional persona.” The director injects humor and playfulness into the proceedings, ensuring that “Karl” is not only informative but also entertaining—a whirlwind history of modern fashion told with style and verve.
The film’s most revealing sequence arrives near the end, when friends and collaborators speculate that Lagerfeld’s icy detachment may have stemmed from witnessing a devastating bombing campaign in Germany as a child. He never spoke of it, but the trauma may have shaped his lifelong instinct to retreat inward, into his imagination. This poignant insight feels like a breakthrough, leaving one to wonder why the film did not begin here rather than close with it.
Ultimately, “Karl” reaffirms the fascination with a man who was equal parts mystery and showman. From the extravagant parties and iconic fashion shows to the paparazzi frenzy he seemed to anticipate before the advent of the Instagram age, Lagerfeld made fashion a global spectacle. The film may not reveal anything startlingly new about him, but perhaps that is because, in some sense, we already knew everything there was to know. He wanted to be unknowable, and even in death, he gets the final say.
