Karl Lagerfeld opposes gay marriage, plus eight other things learned from his interview with Bruce LaBruce

Karl Lagerfeld opposes gay marriage, plus eight other things learned from his interview with Bruce LaBruce

Toronto filmmaker slash smarty-pants smut-monger Bruce LaBruce’s Q&A with designer Karl Lagerfeld in Vice has been circulating around the fashion media, even getting a mention in Shinan Govani’s column today. For the time crunched, nine highlights from the seven-page interview.

1.    Lagerfeld opposes the idea of gay marriage: “I’m against it for a very simple reason: in the ’60s, they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life.” LaBruce agrees.

2.    Lagerfeld doesn’t like to take off his glasses, which he calls “a burka for a man,” because he is nearsighted.

3.    Lagerfeld doesn’t want to hear people talk about their charitable endeavours:

Be politically correct, but please don’t bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that’s the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation… It means people talking about charities. Do it, be charitable, but don’t make a subject of conversation out of it because then you bore the world to death. It’s very unpleasant. But I don’t go out a lot, so I’m not so exposed to people.

4.    Neither man has ever voted in an election.

5.    Lagerfeld enjoys rent boys, but only the classy ones:

I personally only like high-class escorts. I don’t like sleeping with people I really love. I don’t want to sleep with them because sex cannot last, but affection can last forever.

6.    Lagerfeld is besties with hunters and farmers:

When people talk about not using fur, [I ask] “Are you rich enough to make an income for the people in the north who live from hunting? What do you want them to live off of when there’s nothing else to do?… It is farmers who are nice to the cows and the pigs and then kill them. It’s even more hypocritical than hunters. At least the hunters don’t flatter the animals.

7.    Lagerfeld’s refreshing take on “investment pieces”:

If you can afford it, OK. But if you think it’s an investment, then forget about it.

8.    Lagerfeld has never smoked, because his mother told him as a child that his hands weren’t beautiful enough to hold a cigarette.

9. Lagerfeld’s motivation to lose weight:

Well, there came this new line from Hedi Slimane at Dior that you needed to be slim to wear. It said, “You want this? Go back to your bones.” And so I lost it all. I lost 88 pounds and never got them back.

Karl Lagerfeld interview by Bruce La Bruce [Vice]
Kimchi-licious [National Post]