“You look like me, but worse.” The amazing story of Elizabeth, mother of Karl Lagerfeld

in 1981 Karl Lagerfeld (Hamburg, 1933, Paris, 2019) She donated her mother’s wedding dress to the French Arts Union. Model Vionette Satin Beige is “sculptural, gorgeous,” as the journalist describes it Marie Otavi in Karlbiography of a designer just published in Spanish editorial Unnecessary. However, a few years later, when he was a fashion historian Lydia Kametses He began to inquire about him regarding an exhibition on Madeleine Vionnet that he was preparing, and realized that something was of no value: not even the dates – the model dating from 1939, the German designer’s parents, Otto s Elizabeththey had married on April 11, 1930 – nor the size – the contentious dress was made for a woman of more than eighty-one meter, when Elizabeth had barely reached 70 metres.

The Vionnet wedding dress is just one of the many legends that Karl Lagerfeld has woven about his origins. Especially with regard to the woman who may have influenced him the most: his mother, Elizabeth Balhmann, ebbe, who throughout her life and in many of her interviews became an actress or the first woman to obtain a pilot’s license in Europe. And that’s what it collects Karl, was a unique woman of strong character who, according to her son, lived a lively life in Berlin, Weimar Republic. “I have met other men,” boasted the stylist, who was especially proud of his parents “and he is open-minded. I am not sure they have a clean young man.” In fact, Ebby used to warn her that she could freely question her about her childhood “and from the moment you met your father, but what’s in between is none of your business.” Apparently, Ebe, who is known to have worked as a gym teacher, and Otto, a thriving condensed milk business, met in 1929. Since then, he has made an effort to give her the comfortable life she has been aspiring to ever since, it is said. In Otavi’s book, Elizabeth is not cut off from work. Yes to reading – her daily routine consists of getting up in the morning “to lie down on the ottoman and plunge into a book. And I went back to bed just to keep reading,” Lagerfeld stated in 1999 Le Figaro Magazine- And give samples of his strange personality through his frequent revolutions. “If you want to know what’s in books, learn to read!” , he shouted one day to his little son Carl – before him, in 1931, he had Martha Christian which everyone knew as Kristel – when she was barely of school age. The boy noticed this well and quickly plunged into it GoetheAnd the BalzacAnd the Keyserling. Boy Karl alternates with perfect nature The Iliad s war and peace with the magazine fashion.