Memories of Kaiser Karl

Karl Lagerfeld at one of his Chanel shows recreating a French bistro

Towards the end of dinner this evening, my friend looked at her phone and saw a news alert that designer Karl Lagerfeld had died at the age of 85.

It was a shock to hear the news -- I remember watching him on Fashion Television in the late 80s and early 90s talking a mile a minute about how he made fashion relevant or how women wanted strong-looking clothes in the office or how they wanted to be feminine looking or how women wanted clothes to make them feel comfortable.

Back in the early 1990s with supermodels wearing Chanel

These sound bites rattled off his tongue and fashion correspondents lapped it up because he was considered the genius to reinvented Chanel from 1983 into the power fashion house it is today, while keeping Fendi still relevant despite the trend of moving away from wearing fur.

When I first started watching him on TV he already had greying hair -- and yet he kept working 30 years later, averaging a staggering 14 collections a year. How do you come up with so many ideas for so many collections?

That didn't seem to be a problem for him when it came to Chanel, as he continually riffed off the boucle fabric, the interlinking "Cs" and the multiple strands of pearls. He made the iconic boxy jackets into biker ones, or harked back to Coco Chanel's days or paired them with tulle skirts or leather minis.

I was just in awe of the myriad of combinations he would think of and yet each piece would have some kind of Chanel DNA in them.

Lagerfeld recreated a beach for his spring/summer collection

In the last several years he came up with more grandiose ideas of how to present his collections. One time he recreated a bistro in Paris, a supermarket even with Chanel-branded food products on the shelves, or what about trucking in tons of sand to recreate a beach...

Meanwhile Fendi is a brand I am not so familiar with, but he has had a long association with it since 1965! He would experiment with fur, shaving it, dyeing them, creating new textures and colours with them. Customers lapped it up, along with the baguette bag, which has made a comeback in different sizes.

Fashion never really changes, but just enough that you're lusting for the latest one...

He even made a Chanel-themed supermarket for a catwalk

Lagerfeld introduced me to the world of fashion -- it seemed glamorous and beautiful to a young person -- and how the clothes, particularly haute couture were made. He gave me a new appreciation for this art form and that it was important to keep couture alive.

While the German had a quirky personality, he anchored fashion for decades and has left behind a giant hole of creativity. Lagerfeld will be missed.