he has designed under his own name before but with

Karl Lagerfeld Is Now Aiming to Be His Own Brand

The designer Karl Lagerfeld emerges from a back office into the bright, white expanse of his showroom with its concrete floor, towering windows and bouquets of white roses. He moves through his days with an entourage of assistants, publicists and pretty people who are all dressed in black and who hover just outside his personal space. When another member of his publicity team arrives replica louis vuitton handbags wearing a rose colored coat, she receives a subtle but aaa replica designer handbags caustic glance from a colleague. She immediately sheds the offending outerwear, revealing a nondescript black ensemble, thus returning the loft to its sleek black and white perfection.

For designers, appearances are always a matter of concern, but for Lagerfeld at this crucial moment in his professional life they are the most essential part of his story. He has a new collection to sell, one that bears his name. And unlike almost all his previous work, it is a contemporary line created for mass consumption. With a pair of slashed jeans for women that cost $395, men's straight leg jeans priced at $250 and a $150 silk screen T shirt, the collection is not cheap. But it is far more accessible than the designs Lagerfeld creates for his employers at Fendi and Chanel, where the simplest jacket costs thousands of dollars.

Lagerfeld, 67, built his reputation as a hired hand creating dynamic collections for already established brands and Discount Replica Louis Vuitton Bags by transforming himself into one of the fashion industry's most memorable characters. Through his work for Chanel, where he has been since 1983, he became one of the most influential designers of the past 20 years. Long before the resurrection of Gucci, Lanvin or any other dusty old design house, Lagerfeld resuscitated Chanel, which had grown high quality replica handbags china stale and bourgeois after its founder's death in 1971. He elevated Chanel signatures such as the tweed jacket and the little black dress into modern fashion mythology. And he cultivated the provocative notion that fashion could bubble up from the street as easily high quality designer replica handbags wholesale as it could trickle down from the atelier.

"He's an authentic genius," says Peter Marx, president of Saks Jandel, who has known Lagerfeld for 20 years. "There's something unsettling and special about him."

Yet a successful signature label has eluded Lagerfeld. He has designed under his own name before but with only mediocre results. A half dozen times such ventures have petered out, often collapsing from his own inattention.

Other times, the clothes have been so esoteric that they've made little sense to anyone but the designer himself. His most enduring financial success under his own name has been the Karl Lagerfeld group of fragrances.

But in January 2005, Lagerfeld sold his name to Tommy Hilfiger for about $29 million. Later that year the American sportswear company was acquired by Apax Partners, a private equity firm, for $1.6 billion. (For a brief period, it was rumored that Wal Mart was going to buy Tommy Hilfiger. The mere possibility that the highfalutin name of Karl Lagerfeld would be owned by the world's largest and cheapest merchant both horrified and amused the fashion industry.) Hilfiger, who made his name with preppy sportswear, oversize jeans and patriotic logos, has no creative input in Lagerfeld's collection. But for the first time, there is a large scale, focused effort to turn the German born designer into a global brand name in both men's and women's wear.

The Karl Lagerfeld collection was launched this past February with a runway presentation that closed New York Fashion Week. For fall, the collection will be available at such stores as Neiman Marcus, Saks Jandel, Bergdorf Goodman, Intermix and Nordstrom. The new owners have invested millions of dollars wooing top stores, opening an aggressively minimalist showroom and assembling a support staff with the ultimate goal of building a lifestyle brand, which could include anything from housewares to travel accessories.

To make that happen, Lagerfeld is not simply selling his design aesthetic he's selling his image, his reputation and, ultimately, himself. The fashion industry is breathless no, practically quivering with anticipation.

"He is one of fashion's idea men," says Ken Downing, fashion director of Neiman Marcus. "When he says he's going to do something new, you want to see what he's up to. He has his fingers on the pulse of what's happening."

Those in the industry attribute their enthusiasm to Lagerfeld's reputation for being a Renaissance man. He speaks German, English and French. He is a bibliophile with his own publishing imprint. And he is a devotee of the iPod, claiming 100 in his collection. He collects art and antique furniture. Twenty years ago he began to dabble in photography. He now photographs the press kits for Chanel as well as fashion spreads for magazines such as Interview and Harper's Bazaar. He refused to pose for a photograph to accompany this story, instead insisting on providing a self portrait. The photo is essentially the silhouette of a very thin body topped by a large gray orb.

No fashion launch is guaranteed success, but with this one, it's hard to find a naysayer. Lagerfeld's past failures do not seem to register. No one is pointing to the high profile departures of designers Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, who sold their brands, then soured on the new owners. Lagerfeld's obsession with narrow, lean cuts is not viewed as problematic in fake designer bags a marketplace filled with wide, cheap louis vuitton bags from china uk round customers. The glut of celebrity fashion brands is no worry. The emperor's clothes are, apparently, beyond reproach.

Yet while Lagerfeld has an outsize reputation replica louis vuitton bags within the industry, among those not well versed in fashion minutiae, Lagerfeld's celebrity lies somewhere between Ralph Lauren and "who?" Even many media savvy consumers may recognize Lagerfeld solely as a designer with a ponytail and a penchant for wearing sunglasses indoors.

Unlike Lauren or Calvin Klein, Lagerfeld has not starred in his own advertising campaign.

A Look All His OwnIn the weeks before he debuted his collection on the New York runway, Lagerfeld dedicated himself to publicizing the event, and the fashion industry dedicated itself to reiterating the importance of the debut. The designer's life was documented in a feature in New York magazine. He took questions from journalists representing retail markets from San Francisco to Palm Beach. And he sat across the big oak table from Charlie Rose and engaged in a lengthy conversation about fashion, the long term impact of his brutally candid mother and the fact that he has never voted because, as he told Rose: "I know too much about the backstage of politics." Because of his thick German accent and staccato speaking rhythm, about 80 percent of the exchange was comprehensible. That in no way detracted from Lagerfeld's 1:1 replica handbags enjoyment. "I like to be on TV. I love to be on TV," he says.

Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg in 1938 and was the pampered youngest child in a well to do household. He describes his mother, with her impatience for childish stammerings, as tough minded and aloof. His father, whom he called "the sweetest man in the world," made a fortune introducing condensed milk to Europe.

Lagerfeld emigrated to Paris in 1952 to finish school. Three years later, he designed a coat on a lark for a wool association contest and won first prize. The coat was produced by Pierre Balmain, and Lagerfeld became the designer's assistant. Afterward, he worked for Jean Patou, freelanced for a host of fashion houses, became an accomplished illustrator, designed for Chloe and in 1962 signed a contract to create furs and ready to wear for the Rome based Fendi. (He was not responsible for the brand's popular baguette handbag.) Twenty one years later, he was hired to modernize Chanel.

Lagerfeld lives primarily in Paris, although he has several homes including an apartment in New York. He has never been married, has no children and has talked about the death of his longtime companion Jacques de Bascher in 1989 from complications of AIDS as devastating.

For an interview in his headquarters on the Far West Side of Manhattan, Lagerfeld makes an entrance from the opposite side of the room, allowing ample opportunity for inspection before he is within hand shaking distance. He walks chest forward and with short strides. An observer, who happened to catch one of Lagerfeld's television appearances, describes his walk as a "Prince meets Ron Wood pimpalicious strut." Before the eyes settle on his attire, the nose takes note. Lagerfeld smells vaguely floral, with a hint of powder. He has spritzed himself with Iris Nobile by Acqua di Parma. It is a woman's fragrance owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the same company that controls Fendi.

The designer wears skinny black trousers with seams crisscrossing his thin legs, a snug fitting blazer the color of porcini mushrooms, a charcoal gray striped scarf and a pair of high brown boots. Instead of dark glasses, he wears a pair with lavender tinted lenses. One wonders why he is so intent on obscuring his face. It is perfectly pleasant.

"I see myself as a hardworking professional person," he says. "But in another way I'm lucky that I replica louis vuitton can use myself as a kind of puppet."

For a long time, Lagerfeld was a heavyset man who dressed in avant garde, Japanese designed black suits that scorned symmetry and body consciousness. He favored bespoke shirts with high starched collars that made his head look like a boiled egg balanced atop a porcelain cup. He powdered his ponytail white and carried a fan in the manner of an 18th century courtesan. "I have curly hair and I don't like it," he says. "I'm afraid to cut it; it may not come back."

In 2000, motivated by fashion rather than health, the designer lost in the neighborhood of 100 pounds. He took to wearing pencil slim trousers, tight fitting jackets with high armholes, motorcycle boots, fingerless gloves and enough silver jewelry to short circuit metal detectors. He no longer carries a fan. But he still powders his ponytail, a grooming quirk that at close range can leave the uninitiated wondering if the designer has a particularly aggressive form of dandruff. He continues to wear shirt collars as wide as a neck brace.

The image, he says, has "come naturally. If I work on it, then it's marketing."

"It's good to have an image like this. You meet a person with a big smile and they are the meanest person 1:1 replica handbags in the world," he says. "It's good to be seen as unapproachable sometimes. People won't bother you."

cheap louis vuitton bags from china Lagerfeld can be both pleasant and polite, witty and direct, catty and cruel. And on this promotional tour, he is unfailingly patient, willing to talk until his voice gives out. Given the designer's loquaciousness, it seems like a fine opportunity to ask about the recent fashion kerfuffle in which actress Reese Witherspoon was lent a Chanel dress for the Golden Globes that had already been worn by Kirsten Dunst to Globes afterparties in 2003.

The problem, he says, was a fresh transition in the publicity department at Chanel. "That woman at the press office left no files. You have to have files to know who bought what," he says, using the term "bought" very loosely. "I don't think you should give these girls recent vintage. The dress was only three years old. It's nobody's fault but the stupid cow who had no files." Oh my.