He wasn’t just the savior of Chanel. Karl Lagerfeld redefined fashion

You didn’t have to know anything about fashion to know about Karl Lagerfeld, the most instantly recognizable dandy of our time.

Chanel, the luxury fashion house Lagerfeld helmed for more than three decades, announced the designer’s death Tuesday.

As with his designs, his own image was carefully crafted by blending past and present: Snowy white mane and ponytail like a powdered 18th-century periwig; aviator sunglasses; a high, starched white collar; black, fingerless biker gloves worn with multiple silver rings.

Professionally, he was celebrated for saving the House of Chanel, but he was also a video game character (as a DJ in Grand Theft Auto IV), a limited-edition teddy bear ($1,400) and a diamanté-embellished doll ($190).

Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion visionary and creative director of Chanel, has died, the company told CNN Tuesday.

Here, Lagerfeld greets the public after the Chanel Spring-Summer haute couture collection show in Paris, in January 2010.

Lagerfeld is photographed after winning the coats category in a design competition sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat in 1954.

Lagerfeld pictured in his Paris apartment in 1974.

Lagerfeld visits Japan in 1977.

Lagerfeld after the Chanel Autumn-Winter 1984 show.

Lagerfeld poses with models after the Chanel Autumn-Winter 1985 show.

Lagerfeld with French model Inès de la Fressange ahead of the Chanel's Autumn-Winter 1987 show.

Lagerfeld poses with model Claudia Schiffer in 1992.

Lagerfeld wears a tuxedo with a large bow tie, accompanied by Vogue publisher, Anna Wintour, at the 12th annual Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards ceremony in New York in 1993.

Karl Lagerfeld, followed by German model Claudia Schiffer, at Chanel's Autumn-Winter 1995 show.

Lagerfeld fans himself during Chanel's Autumn-Winter 1999 haute couture show.

Lagerfeld greets the crowd at the end of the Spring-Summer 2005 Chanel show.

Lagerfeld at the opening of his exhibition "Karl Lagerfeld - Photografies" in Apolda, Germany.

Lagerfeld at a press preview of "Chanel", an exhibition of the history of the fashion House of Chanel, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005.

Lagerfeld walks the runway at the end of the Chanel Autumn-Winter 2006 show.

Lagerfeld pictured at the end of the Chanel Spring-Summer 2007 show.

Lagerfeld attends a Berlin photocall to promote the movie "Lagerfeld Confidential" in 2007.

Lagerfeld acknowledges the public at the end of Chanel's Autumn-Winter 2007 show.

Lagerfeld poses at the opening of his "Little Black Jacket" exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2012.

Lagerfeld walks the Chanel runway after the brand's Spring-Summer 2014 show.

Lagerfeld, surrounded by models, walks the runway after the protest-themed Spring-Summer 2015 Chanel show.

Lagerfeld attends the Dior Menswear Autumn-Winter 2016 show in Paris.

Lagerfeld waves from the runway of the Chanel show during Paris Fashion in October 2018.

Karl Lagerfeld in photos: The life of a fashion pioneer

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His Birman cat, Choupette – as snowy white as his hair – was the subject of her own coffee table book, and is reported to have generated $4 million in modeling fees in 2014.

Closely observing him at work in 1991, the Paris correspondent of the Los Angeles Times wondered: “Does Karl Lagerfeld ever sit still?” The short answer appeared to be no.

Karl Lagerfeld and Lily Rose Depp at the Chanel Spring-Summer 2017 Haute Couture show.

“I do my job like I breathe,” Lagerfeld told the New Yorker in 2007. And he did so with a staggering work ethic. “I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that’s all.”

Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1933. In later life, he would be coy about his date of birth, usually trimming at least five years off his age.

In the early 1950s, he saw his first fashion shows in Hamburg, including one by Christian Dior. With his mother’s encouragement, he decided to leave Hamburg for fashionable Paris.

In 1954, he won a womenswear design competition and joined the haute couture house of Pierre Balmain. Three years later, he moved to the House of Patou. After that, he began freelancing for Chloé, and by 1967 counted Fendi among his clients.

His decision to accept an offer to be artistic director at Chanel in 1983 elevated him to an infinitely higher fashion sphere, and transformed both their fortunes.

“When I took on Chanel, it was a sleeping beauty. Not even a beautiful one. She snored,” he said in “Lagerfeld Confidential,” a 2007 documentary. “So I was to revive a dead woman.”

Chanel Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 2016

Chanel Cruise 2016

Chanel Autumn-Winter 2016

Chanel Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2016

Chanel Spring-Summer 2016

Chanel Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 2015

Chanel Autumn-Winter 2015

Chanel Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2015

Chanel Spring-Summer 2015

Chanel Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 2014

Chanel Cruise 2014

Chanel Autumn-Winter 2014

Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel

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Lagerfeld acknowledged the brand’s history but treated it irreverently. He became King Karl with a court of assistants; ruthless, unsentimental and constantly inventive. To survive “you have to cut the roots to make new roots,” he told the New Yorker.

“Because fashion is about today. You can take an idea from the past, but, if you do it the way it was, no one wants it.”

Lagerfeld was a celebrity for so long that we forget that he changed his image more than once. In a striking Helmut Newton portrait from the early 1970s, his hair is jet black, he has a thick, piratical beard and sports a rimless monocle. For almost 20 years, he was seldom seen without a Japanese fan, swiftly spread and fluttered for photographers. Like Warhol, Lagerfeld had an instinct about his own image.

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Karl Lagerfeld: The man behind Chanel

07:17 - Source: CNN

He also took some delight in being politically incorrect. Adele was “a little too fat,”; and “in a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish,” he told the BBC in 2009.

His intellectual frame of reference was wide – Emily Dickinson, Sarah Bernhardt, Alfred Stieglitz, Isak Dinesen. If relaxed, his interviews could turn into monologues. He spoke quickly, words rolling off the tongue in a clipped German accent.

According to an interview with stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington, Lagerfeld was a voracious reader, “permanently filling himself with independent culture and establishment culture … like a sampling machine.”

There was a dread of being passé. As Lagerfeld knew, you always had to be absolutely au courant in fashion, even into your 80s, even when your competitors were half your age.