BBC Documentary Questions Whereabouts of Karl Lagerfeld’s Fortune, Again
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LONDON — Dropping days before this year’s Met Gala, where the legacy of the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld will be celebrated, the documentary “The Mysterious Mr. Lagerfeld” tried to figure out who will inherit the designer’s fortune, which is estimated to be 200 million euros, while offering a condensed overview of the extraordinary life of the polymathic designer at Chanel, Fendi and his namesake label.
For that purpose, director Michael Waldman spoke to members of Lagerfeld’s inner circle: Sébastien Jondeau, his bodyguard; Baptiste Giabiconi, a model and friend; Brad Kroenig, a longtime muse; Françoise Caçote, the caretaker of Choupette, the designer’s pampered Burmese cat; Caroline Lebar, the late designer’s communication director, and Céline Degoulet, Lagerfeld’s lawyer, who has access to his will but declined to share the details, among others.
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There were a few emotional moments, such as Kroenig, who is the subject of Lagerfeld’s book “Metamorphoses of an American” and now works as a real estate agent in Florida, sitting on a beach with his family while shedding tears about how Lagerfeld changed the trajectory of his life. But no vital information regarding the inheritance was extracted.
It’s was reported in 2020 that there are seven beneficiaries to Lagerfeld’s estate. They are model Jake Davis, Lebar, Giabiconi, Jondeau, Caçote and Kroenig and his son Hudson, who is Lagerfeld’s godson.
But since Lucien Frydlender, Lagerfeld’s main accountant for more than three decades, who is believed to be the only person with enough knowledge about the late designer’s assets to help with his succession, has relocated to Switzerland and was unable to be reached to answer any questions due to what was described as “ill health,” it leaves the presumed heirs in the dark about what they are going to receive.
Degoulet, who also helped Lagerfeld broker collaboration deals, explained that, “The situation left at the end was not very tidy. This kind of big succession can take 10 years,” and the fact that his assets are split between France and Monaco means that the cost of processing the fortune, mostly taxes, will be enormous.
Inheritance talks aside, the documentary, which aired on BBC2, painted a picture of the designer that was largely in line with how he has always been known: he was a workaholic, a marketing genius, a vintage furniture addict, a generous friend, but at the same time a very distant and private person.
It did offer some fresh insight into the life of the late designer, however.
For example, it was revealed that Jondeau was the only one who knew about Lagerfeld’s final illness, which started in June 2015, and in order to shield this news from the press, all drugs issued to Lagerfeld were prescribed under Jondeau’s name from the pharmacy.
Jondeau, who had his first brush with the designer as a 15-year-old from a rough-and-tumble Paris neighborhood conscripted to move some 18th-century furniture for his father, said Lagerfeld helped him buy a house in St. Tropez, where he currently lives, and for better and for worse, completely changed his life.
“He gave me the chance to make new things and to arrive in a new world. I was on the top of this new world. It’s like to live a lot of things and everything crashes.…You don’t really know who you are because at one point you are living in a different world. And it’s difficult to go back. You cannot go back to the old world. It’s impossible. You prefer to die,” said Jondeau.
The documentary also touched base on the designer’s love life.
Gilles Defour, a former colleague of Lagerfeld at Chanel, recalled introducing the designer to Jacques de Bascher, who Lagerfeld admitted was the love of his life, and with whom he got into a bitter love triangle with Yves Saint Laurent.
“Karl and Jacques was absolutely the perfect love story and the perfect impossible story. Karl has a problem with sex. He can’t have sex. And Jacques was crazy about sex. That’s why he let Jacques, um, go everywhere, with many attractions for him,” said Patrick Hourcade, an artist and close friend of the designer, who hid Lagerfeld’s mother’s ashes for two years in his bedroom.
“When I decide to divorce Karl, I gave back the ashes…and he sent me back by fax nine pages, telling me that he will never be happy, and he was very disappointed about, you know, about our relationship. I kept the letter. It was between crying and nostalgia for the past,” Hourcade said.
With regard to Lagerfeld’s relationship with his muses, especially with Giabiconi, former Vogue Paris editor in chief Carine Roitfeld said that: “We all figured that he had a crush on Baptiste. That’s for sure. He’s exceptionally beautiful, but personally, I never see any kissing. Nothing could be sexual or anything. People talk a lot. I never see anything.”
Giabiconi in the documentary described his relationship with Lagerfeld more like father and son. He added that, “At one point, we had expressed a desire to one day maybe for Karl to adopt me. That’s what he wanted. He gave me a present, a set of luggage from Louis Vuitton. He ordered initials on the luggage. So he put BLG, Baptiste Lagerfeld Giabiconi.”
A little-known part of Lagerfeld that was revealed in the documentary was his relationship with his Connecticut-based niece Caroline Johnson, whom Lagerfeld met when he came to visit his sister Christiane in 1974. He later invited them to visit Paris and in 1992 offered to make his niece a wedding gown.
“The dress did not come until the day before the wedding. He put it on the Concorde. It has its own seat and it was delivered by a driver to my house in the middle of a snowstorm,” recalled Johnson.
As for his beloved pet Choupette, which originally belonged to Giabiconi, she has moved on and become a full-time pet influencer with a raft of marketing appointments in her diary. Last year, Choupette launched a series of high-end cat furniture with LucyBalu.
According to her manager Lucas Bérullier, Choupette is “an enormous diva. If she doesn’t want, it’s her decision. We won’t force her.”
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