In a new interview with Numéro magazine, famed fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld—the man behind Chanel, Fendi, and his eponymous line—had some harsh words about the #MeToo movement.

“I’m fed up with it…What shocks me most in all of this are the starlets who have taken 20 years to remember what happened,” he said when asked about the topic. “Not to mention the fact there are no prosecution witnesses.” The 84-year-old German designer does, however, say that he “cannot stand” Harvey Weinstein.

As for whether or not #MeToo or Time’s Up have affected his work? That’s a hard no from Lagerfeld. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I read somewhere that now you must ask a model if she is comfortable with posing. It’s simply too much, from now on, as a designer, you can’t do anything. As for the accusations against the poor Karl Templar [creative director at Interview magazine], I don’t believe a single word of it. A girl complained he tried to pull her pants down and he is instantly excommunicated from a profession that up until then had venerated him. Its unbelievable. If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model! Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent. They’re recruiting even!”

Lagerfeld’s no stranger to making controversial statements. Last year, his allusion to the Holocaust when condemning chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies on a French talk show sparked outrage, as did a cartoon he drew for a German newspaper, featuring Merkel and Adolf Hitler; before that, he built up quite a long history of body-shaming comments, as well as a feud with Meryl Streep.

His comments on #MeToo weren’t the only eye-raising things from his Numéro interview. On designers claiming they feel overworked, he said, “The worst thing about all of this, is that they try and blame me for their problems with working overtime. Azzedine [Alaïa], for example, before falling down the stairs, claimed that the supposedly unsustainable rhythms in fashion today were entirely my fault, which is absurd.” Before adding, about Alaïa, “I don’t criticise him, even if at the end of his career all he did was make ballet slippers for menopausal fashion victims.” When asked who between Virgil Abloh, Jacquemus, and Jonathan Anderson he’d take to a desert island, he responded, “I’d kill myself first.”

The interview concludes with this: “When I was young, my mother always said to me that I was stupid, she called me ‘Mule’. I’ve probably just been overcompensating ever since. And I’m not surrounded by idiots, I have fantastic teams. So, when it comes to the retarded and other ignoramuses, I don’t see them, I don’t know them…”

Source link