Vogue May 2023

KARL LAGERFELD WAS MANY THINGS: a friend, a consummate artist, a paradox. He was a designer who thrived on attention but also led an intensely private life. He was a well-read intellectual who adored the heady lights of popular culture. His desk heaved with books and paper, but he always had the latest technology at his fingertips. And he, of course, declared that fashion didn’t belong in a museum—it should look ahead, not be consigned to history. But here he is with a retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. I’m at peace with the small role I’ve played in this last contradiction because I know he would have loved being recognized—and there’s simply no one more deserving. All credit goes to Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s brilliant…

This Charming Man “My impression was of an emperor at the height of his powers, possessed of an electrifying force that could scan the potential in everyone he encountered.” So writes Amanda Harlech of first meeting Karl Lagerfeld in “Karl & Me” (page 142), a vivid remembrance of her trusted friend. (At left, the two share a moment at the Librairie 7L, the elegant bookshop Lagerfeld established at 7 Rue de Lille in Paris.) Harlech goes on to describe her heady early days with Lagerfeld at Chanel, where her role was to provide “an outside pair of eyes” as new collections came together; consulting at his “wild, exuberant” fittings for Fendi; and the many other ways that they shared space and exchanged ideas—over dinner in Rome, Paris, and Saint-Tropez; through…

Dear Karl… “Karl took me under his wing,” writes Giorgio Armani, “with a kindness I still remember to this day.” Legendary for his notes, faxes, and congratulatory bouquets, Karl Lagerfeld was the consummate communicator. In this issue, a few fashion friends return the favor.…

Karl Lagerfeld was a dear friend to our founder, René Lacoste. Both of them were visionaries who left their mark on their time and forever on fashion, elevating some of their designs to iconic status. Karl and René shared many common values, putting their high standards at the service of creativity. Karl had a special gift for staying true to the heritage while modernizing wardrobes. This drawing of René through Karl’s eyes is a sacred meeting of two icons. This very special edition of the iconic polo signed by Karl Lagerfeld will be forever cherished and carefully protected within our House. It is our way of ensuring that Karl Lagerfeld’s legacy and the indelible mark he leaves on fashion live on.…

On an unseasonably warm, sun-soaked February afternoon, Aurora James is taking a break from the whirlwind of New York Fashion Week at the Italian restaurant Gemma. In the past week she has thrown a gala for her nonprofit, attended shows by Brandon Maxwell and Rodarte, and, presently, is sitting down to discuss her memoir, Wildflower. If this all sounds like a feat of multitasking, it should come as no surprise from James. Over the last three years, aside from writing her first book, she also launched the industry-changing nonprofit Fifteen Percent Pledge—a drive to push retailers toward committing at least 15 percent (the size of America’s Black population) of their shelf space to Black-owned brands—while continuing to run her successful, CFDA-winning label of mindfully made shoes and accessories, Brother Vellies.…

As a graduate student at the Yale School of Art, Hayal Pozanti vowed that she would invent nothing less than a new visual language. She had arrived in 2009, directly from Istanbul, where she was born, and had been caught up in post-internet art—art that uses the internet as its medium. “I was feeling overwhelmed and bombarded by images and information online,” she tells me. “I made a radical decision to not get the internet installed at my house. I needed to wean myself off the computer so that I could go back to the hand and make something new.” The visual language that she developed over the next decade, called “Instant Paradise,” came from 31 invented, hieroglyphic-like characters, which correspond to numbers and letters in the English alphabet. Her…