The Hulu limited series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld brilliantly and viscerally evokes the dangerous beauty of the smoky nightclubs and dark discos filled with slithering bodies of Paris in the 1970s — a time and place I knew from visiting as a teenager. Thanks to the work of production designer Jean Rabasse, watching it, I was transported back to the first trip I took there while still in high school; it was nothing like I had ever known in New York City. The film took me right back to that wild, wonderful trip. And it will take you there too, even if you didn’t have my lenient parents.
The show, which begins in 1972, focuses on the rise of Lagerfeld, a pragmatic, gifted, uptight designer who came to Paris from Germany in the 1950s. Lagerfeld was working for Chloé and living with his mother when he met the party boy Jacques de Bascher, whom he fell in love with, in his own prim, controlling way. In the show, Lagerfeld’s mother makes it clear that she doesn’t approve — especially after de Bascher also begins an affair with Yves Saint Laurent. It’s a humanizing portrayal of Lagerfeld, who, for all his decades of success as creative director of Chanel — a job he held from 1983 until his death in 2019 — is also a controversial figure, as commentary around the Met Gala theme last year showed. (Meanwhile, Lagerfeld’s former number two and successor, Virginia Viard, was recently shown the door.)
But the show is set before Chanel, when he was evolving his personal style while nurturing his obsession with interior design and architecture. It begins with his life in one of his first apartments on Rue de l’Université, where he moved in with his mother in 1963. His mercurial chameleon tastes kept pace with the people he met and what they inspired in him. He started off with a mix of classical Scandinavian, Italian, and American furniture, leaving the traditional parquet floors and wood paneling alone, until lacquering the walls white and bringing in chrome and steel in an ode to his love of all things high-tech; he was one of the first to have a photocopier and a Brionvega stereo designed by Achille Castiglioni. Andrée Putman introduced him to Art Deco, inspiring further changes in the décor with pieces by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann mixed in with designs by Joe Colombo and Eero Saarinen.
The series takes us to Lagerfeld’s Saint-Sulpice apartment in full deco mode and his Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo mansion (Château de Champlatreux was its stand-in for the show) regaled in 18th-century gilded glamour, as well as YSL’s living room filled with art treasures at 55 Rue de Babylone.
Lagerfeld acquired many houses over his lifetime in France, Italy, and Germany, each one with a very specific décor. Thirteen are documented in the book Karl Lagerfeld, A Life in Houses, by Patrick Mauriès and Marie Kalt. It’s great additional reading for people who, like me, enjoyed his world in this show. But that book had not come out by the time Rabasse, who was previously production designer on The City of Lost Children and Jackie, started his research to create approximately 50 sets for the show. I asked him how he did it.
Tell me about the research you did.
For this project, I hired a well-known French set dresser, Nathalie Roubaud, who stayed focused on the documentation. She worked for about four months simply looking for images, references, atmospheres from that period and from the different characters’ apartments. She found several thousand images. By chance, I discovered that I have a mutual friend with Philippe Heurtault, who was Karl Lagerfeld’s personal assistant, his photographer, and a close friend of Jacques de Bascher. Many images from that period were taken by him. This allowed me to have a direct connection with the Karl of that period, to talk about their daily lives and the personal lives of this group of friends. I haven’t spoken to him since the release of the series. He lives in Bretagne, and I can’t wait to see if he thinks we’ve captured the life and spirit of that era.
I had to visit more than 250 apartments, castles, nightclubs, etc. It was a colossal job. I was very demanding in the choice of these sets — the production gave me complete freedom to find these places, and some of them had never been shot before. There was so much location-scouting on this series and I was so involved that it took me several months of work and research.
So it was mostly shot in actual locations.
We had decided not to use any studio sets, but we never found anything that looked like YSL and Pierre Bergé’s iconic apartment, so we recreated it in a studio to be closer to reality. This allowed us to do the top shot of the opening sequence in YSL’s apartment.
So most of the sets are fairly true to life?
Like all period films, it’s a mix of rigorous reconstruction and a great deal of creativity. For example, Marlene Dietrich’s apartment has nothing to do with the real one she had at the time, which was much simpler, but the script showed her as an aging star who was still very flamboyant, so I created a very expressive and spectacular set. Cinema can’t be satisfied with historical reality. it has to respect it as much as possible and use it to define strong universes.
Lagerfeld’s apartment on the Rue de l’Université is in part very close to reality, in particular Karl’s living room and study, with the same furniture and the same colors, sculptures by Chana Orloff and Eduardo Lenad, lamps by Pierre Chareau, George Nelson’s study and Joe Colombo’s dessert, but the corridor leading to his mother’s bedroom is pure invention on my part. It was the designer Philippe Cord’homme who found all this furniture and suggested it to me.
Tell me about the lamps with different bases in Lagerfeld’s bedroom. One has a candelabra for a base.
You refer to the décor of Karl’s bedroom at the Place Saint-Sulpice. It’s a very faithful reproduction of the real one. I took a lot of liberty with the salon at Saint-Sulpice, but this bedroom, with its Edgar Brandt lamps and majestic bed, is very close to reality.
What about de Bascher’s apartment?
It was sketched with very little iconographic reference. Instead, I was inspired by photos taken in his bedroom at his parents’ home in Neuilly. So, I mixed several authentic sources of inspiration and took a lot of liberty.
Knowing that it was Karl who financed the construction work on this apartment, I took the fabrics and furniture used in his apartment in the ‘60s and combined them with images of de Bascher’s bedroom. The process of creating a set requires you to take inspiration from lots of sources and then imagine what mix of all this might correspond to your character.
Tell me about YSL’s apartment. What is just as it was in real life?
We reproduced the Ernest Boiceau carpet, the Brancusi sculptures, and the Andy Warhol painting identically, and the furniture was either a copy or very close to reality. I couldn’t get the necessary rights to use César’s sculptures, so I replaced them with sculptures by Signori, a contemporary and friend of César’s but much easier to find.
Jessy Kupperman was the designer of this set, she found armchairs in the style of Jean-Michel Frank, copies of Dunand vases that we made, an enfilade by Maurice Dufresne, Perzel vase lamps, and stools by Poul Kjærholm.
It’s a real mix of signed furniture, very similar furniture in style, workmanship, and a lot of invention.
What was the most difficult thing?
Paris cityscapes were difficult to reproduce. I studied art at the school on Rue Madame, 50 meters from Place Saint-Sulpice, which meant that at the age of 17, I was living in the same neighborhood, going to the same cafés as Lagerfeld and YSL, I must have bumped into them all the time without knowing it, so I used my own memories of the Paris of that time, and its atmosphere.
Were you able to enlist the aid of Lagerfeld or Saint Laurent’s archives?
No, we’re talking about the beginnings of the great careers of these artists and it’s not very well documented, except by Philippe Heurtault, who gave me access to his archives and memories. He has a treasury of photos and anecdotes, which he should be writing books about.
