German-born fashion designer most known for his work at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, is the topic of interest at the upcoming 2023 Met Gala. Entitled ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’, the exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will examine the designer’s career journey and artistry. Unsurprisingly, the dress code for the most important night in fashion is ‘In Honour of Karl’.

With eyes squarely on the Met Gala taking place in mere weeks, many are looking back at the life of Karl Lagerfeld, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Born in Hamburg on September 10th 1933, Karl Otto Lagerfeld would go on to lie at length about the date of his birth, imploring that he was, instead, born in 1938, making himself 5 years younger. The whole shambles is the focus of the opening chapter of William Middleton’s latest biography of the fashion star ‘Paradise Now’. Middleton writes of Lagerfeld, “When he moved to Paris, in 1952, he was not fourteen years old, as he had long claimed, but nineteen. When he won his first big fashion prize, in 1954, he was not sixteen but twenty-one. And when he took over the responsibilities of Chanel, in 1983, he was not forty-five years old, as suggested, but fifty.”

Blurring the lines of one’s origin may be seen as an act of vanity and, without doubt, adjusting the date of his birth allowed Lagerfeld to align himself with a prodigy narrative, permitting his talents to seem even more extraordinary. After all, as a man rather obsessed with his appearance and by all means somewhat conceited, this didn’t seem too out of the realm of possibility. In reality, however, the real reason for the adaption of Lagerfeld’s age is far darker.

1933 was a calamitous year for Germany, with Hitler named Chancellor in January. The Reichstag was burnt to the ground in February. On March 20th 1933 Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp was completed. It opened two days later. The country’s societal and political frameworks and freedoms were destroyed over the course of a handful of months. During this devastating time for his home country, Karl Lagerfeld was born. Simply put, Lagerfeld did not want to associate his coming into this world with the Third Reich.

Adjusting the date of his birth distanced Lagerfeld not just from 1933, but made it so he was younger during the Second World War, insinuating that he was too young to understand and grasp the full horrors of the time.

In ‘Paradise Now’, Middleton writes of the time German book publisher, and close friend of Lagerfeld, Gerhard Steidl finally broached the topic with the designer. “Karl’s answer was revelatory. “I was ashamed,” he told Steidl. “I was ashamed that I was born in the year when Hitler started his project of killing the Jewish population of Germany. And I did not want to be connected to that year.””

While Lagerfeld may have confided this truth in a close friend, he would never do so publicly. He announced publicly that he was celebrating his "70th birthday" on 10 September 2008, despite actually turning 75. During a French television interview in February of 2009, he insisted that no one truly knew his real birth date, stating he was born “neither in 1933 or 1938”. In April 2015, he then decided to announce he was actually born in 1935. However, the birth announcement published by his parents at the time and, of course, the baptismal register in Hamburg all confirm the date of September 10th 1933.