The physical ease of the dancers is the most important thing.” The designs were clean, minimalist, and, at first, so translucently revealing that Oaks requested he change them. Lagerfeld first designed costumes for Apollo in 1997 for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, but when he updated the costumes for English National Ballet principle dancers Thomas Edur and Agnes Oaks in 2009, he told British Vogue that “the main challenge is that they can move in the clothes. Even more so than opera, ballet requires an intuitive and highly technical understanding of the body in flight. Photo: Courtesy Everett Collectionīallet was another recurring source of creative fire. Lagerfeld provided the costumes for Franco Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever. Lagerfeld also provided 22 original costumes for Franco Zeffirelli’s 2002 film Callas Forever, dramatizing the later years of the grand diva of opera Maria Callas. In 2008, he was one of three designers tasked by New York’s Metropolitan Opera to provide costumes for the renowned soprano Renée Fleming-Lagerfeld’s contribution being a jet black and lavender confection of lace and silk faille for her role as Manon. His work combined high drama with deep research, attentive to history without ever feeling fusty. He outfitted numerous operas, from Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann at Florence’s Teatro Comunale (1980) and Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens at Milan’s La Scala (1982) through to Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at the Opéra de Montecarlo (2009). Lagerfeld was equally adept at creating costumes for live performances. Lagerfeld’s predecessor Coco Chanel also provided costumes for films including Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and was pioneering in her playful, provocatively modern work for the Ballet Russes. The latter four films starred the poised French actor Stéphane Audran, whom Lagerfeld costumed frequently.
Sometimes this involved wider costuming, sometimes dressing a single actor (à la Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy). In the 1970s and ’80s, he worked on numerous films, including Silver Bears (1977), Les Noces Rouges (1973), Folies Bourgeoises (1976), The Black Bird (1975), and Babette’s Feast (1987). Alongside his prodigious work as a fashion designer for houses including Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Lagerfeld also crafted many costumes for the stage and screen, ranging from Harold Pinter plays to acclaimed French and German classics.
The combination of fetish gear and understated elegance seemed fitting for a renaissance man whose clothes often trod the line between classic and naughty.
Karl Lagerfeld was the costume designer responsible for creating that memorably opulent excrescence. Stephane Audran, David Warner, and Michael Caine in Silver Bears.
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