Unlike other recent books about Lagerfeld, this account is based upon interviews with Karl himself and is further enriched with additional material from interviews and testimonies from colleagues, friends, relatives, and muses including the Princess of Hanover, Bernard and Helene Arnault, Silvia Fendi, Bruno Pavlovsky, Tom Ford, Alessandro Michele, Valentino, Carine Roitfeld, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Ines de La Fressange, Linda Evangelista, Tadao Ando, Fran Lebowitz, and others. Like a cat, Karl Lagerfeld had several lives he reinvented himself constantly over the course of his eighty-five years. He was many things: inspired creator, witty raconteur, media darling, highly cultured, eccentric in his manners, insatiable at work, asexual, a germophobe, ultra-sensitive but given to maintaining grudges. This account offers especially perceptive insights into Lagerfeld s relationship with Jacques de Bascher, his only true love, and how Yves Saint Laurent s later passion for de Bascher resulted in the infamous break in the longstanding friendship between the two couturiers. In comparison to other recent biographies, Marie Ottavi deftly gets at Lagerfeld s true inner nature.
