Meet Loic Prigent, Whose Footage of Karl Lagerfeld Plays a Vital Role at the Met’s “A Line of Beauty” Exhibit

Those grand, epic shows would fly past in 10 minutes or so, but there was so much information and conversation stitched into the clothes. You were so fortunate to get the translation straight from the source.

Where I was really lucky is that when I started filming for Arte, the executive producer there, Pierrette Ominetti, had a very clear policy. He told me ‘don’t film Karl the star, film Karl the worker, and focus on the people who work with him.’ So I was always interested in the sketching and his process of graphic design. Karl would always say, ‘I’m only a graphic designer, that’s all’ to the premieres at Chanel—and that’s the Karl I would film. It’s true that I have lots of footage of him being maybe more mundane but I would never use that footage, because I was always primarily interested in the work.

In the 20 or so year period that you were filming him, did you observe broader changes in his interests or manner, or was he very consistently himself?

Karl was very consistently completely himself. A lot of his teams stayed the same, in all the studios. It was a very stable environment around him. Maybe I started filming him around the beginning of the last era of Karl: this was the Karl who wanted to be hip all the time, who wanted to engage with youth all the time, and who was compelled always to keep his eye on the ball of wider culture. He would always have the new iPhone before anybody else…

Do you remember he was so enchanted by iPhones when they first came out he would give them away?

He was obsessed! He was showering people with iPhones—incroyable. He was like an iPhone distributor!

I remember interviewing him at one fitting before a show in Versailles and it was classic. Karl was sipping Diet Coke from a golden goblet that a beautiful man had poured him, with maybe 50 boxed iPhones stacked behind him that he would give away to everyone—although not to me!

It was the same with iPads: I’m sure he was the biggest buyer in the Apple store in Paris.

Going from Karl’s tech to Karl’s technicality, the theory behind Andrew Bolton’s curation is a clever way of contextualizing his massive output: using the theory of the line of beauty to sketch Karl’s dual creative instincts. Thanks to that education from Karl himself, you understand the work very deeply. Does that hypothesis ring true to you?