On another occasion, he explained, “You have fat moms with their bags of chips sitting in front of the TV saying skinny models are ugly.” Obviously, he said, fashion was never meant for them.
Mr. Lagerfeld hasn’t been a fan of the #MeToo movement either, inquiring in a 2018 interview why some women take years to publicly share their stories of sexual assault. “I’m sick of it,” he told Numero magazine. “What shocks me most about all of this is the stars who took 20 years to remember what happened. Not to mention the lack of corroborating witnesses.”
Same-sex marriage was another target. “I am against it for a very simple reason,” he said in 2010. “In the 1960s, they all said we had the right to be different. Now, all of a sudden, they want a bourgeois life.”
Only a few venerable icons were spared from his contempt. In an interview with New York Magazine, he said of Diana, Princess of Wales, “She was beautiful and she was kind, but she was dumb.” Nor did he hold back Andy Warhol: “I don’t have to say this, but physically, it was disgusting.”
He admired Kate Middleton, but not her sister Pippa, saying that he did not like her face and that she “should only show her back”. As for Lana Del Rey’s “Is She Built With All Her Implants?”
Mr. Lagerfeld is often hard on himself.
He claimed that he had no vaunted ideals. “My only ambition is to wear size 28 jeans,” he said. He did not write memoirs: “I have nothing to say,” he stated emphatically. As he hinted, contentment often eluded him.
As he puts it, “I’m the kind of fiend who never orgasms.”