Tales from the Back Row by Amy Odell

his cat Choupette, whoeats fresh seafood off fine china and has been on the cover of German Vogue . He goes everywhere wearing a full three-piece suit with a tie, layered silver necklaces, and the occasional diamanté brooch. He is never without fingerless leather gloves and sunglasses, and keeps his powder-white hair in a low ponytail. His look is best summed up as a cross between the Founding Fathers and Michael Jackson.
    No matter what he does, he’s heralded as a genius and promptly copied by nearly every other important designer. Karl’s runway shows have included purses fashioned from hula hoops, full-fur Chewbacca suits, and skirt suits with beaver tails. He has that rare ability to make rich people lust for seemingly terrible things, like clogs, fur boots, and basket-weave purses. This is a very hard thing to do, but also really important for a fashion designer because what’s amazeballs one decade is highly questionable the next (see: fringed vests for men, overalls with a strap down, brown carpets people had in their homes in the ’70s). If designers never convinced us to want the things we didn’t already have, we’d never shop. The next time you want something impractical you know you shouldn’t buy, like pilgrim shoes, you can probably trace the influence back to someone like Karl, Marc Jacobs, and—if what you’re eyeing are really tight pants and you are a man—Hedi Slimane.
    Karl’s theatrical spirit makes him a natural for putting on fashion shows. (I have never been invited to one because I am not important enough to attend, being neither Posh Spice, a socialite with a Vogue column, an Olsen twin, nor J. Lo’s child.) For the purpose of dressing ladies in clothes and having them walk back and forth, he’s created a faux “airplane,” where the aisle served as the runway, a barn floored with hay and dirt, an iceberg imported from Northern Europe, and a carousel made from oversized Chanel purses. IfKarl ever finds himself bankrupt and without a job in fashion, I’m quite convinced he could make a career out of creating amusement parks for older, rich ladies for whom the word summer is primarily a verb. He could charge $200 an hour, and one of the “rides” could involve sitting in the cabin of a private plane while flight attendants serve you low-cal fish mousse. Now, would spendy fifty-year-old broads be into that or what?
    One of my other favorite fun facts about Karl: he published a diet book with the least useful recipes in history, such as fish soufflé, vegetables in aspic, and ham and raspberry mousse. Naturally, it worked fabulously for him and utterly failed for everyone else who would rather not eat than either try to prepare vegetable aspic or actually consume it.
    I wrote the art gallery immediately to find out if this was really going to happen, Karl Lagerfeld strutting his fish-soufflé-eating self into this exhibition. I was assured that, yes, Karl was in fact supposed to appear in the flesh to fete an exhibition of photographs of Brad Kroenig he took for a book that consisted entirely of photographs of Brad Kroenig. The Amazon.com description of Metamorphoses of an American: A Cycle of Youth 2003–2008 reads:
    In Metamorphoses of an American, Karl Lagerfeld documents the physical and emotional development of Brad Kroenig, the world’s most sought-after male model . . . Lagerfeld discovered Kroenig in 2003, making his first photographs of the young man in Biarritz; since then, he has diligently observed Kroenig through the photographic lens, month by month.
    The weirdest part of this whole event was that Karl would spend five years photographing one male model in order to put hisobsession on full display in an art gallery in, of all places, midtown. (There were likely also openings in other exotic cities like Venice and Seoul, but let’s just focus on New York City.) Being in midtown feels like