Karl Otto Lagerfeld was born on September 10, 1933, in Hamburg, Germany, to Otto Lagerfeld, a businessman who imported evaporated milk, and Elisabeth Bahlmann. The precise date of his birth was itself a Lagerfeld production: he claimed various years throughout his life, settling eventually on 1933 though some biographers suggest 1935. He moved to Paris at seventeen to study fashion illustration, won the International Woolmark Prize in the coat category in 1954 (Yves Saint Laurent won the dress category), and was hired as an assistant to Pierre Balmain. He subsequently worked for Jean Patou and Chloé before beginning his long association with Fendi (from 1965) and Chanel (from 1983).
Lagerfeld's appointment as creative director of Chanel in 1983 is one of the most meaningful moments in the history of luxury fashion: the house had been dormant since Coco Chanel's death in 1971, and Lagerfeld revived it not by preserving it as a museum but by making it contemporary — retaining the Chanel codes while reinterpreting them with full awareness of each season's cultural moment. He produced approximately 14 collections a year between Chanel, Fendi, and his own brand for over thirty-five years, a volume of output that is staggering in a field that demands genuine creative originality rather than routine production.
Lagerfeld's ESTP character is visible in the empiricism of his creative process: he drew constantly, working through ideas by putting them on paper rather than by theorizing about them, and his working method had the ESTP quality of the craftsman who develops through doing rather than through planning. His productivity — the drawings, the collections, the photography, the books — was the product of a sensory intelligence that could not stop processing the world into creative output. His personal style — the dark sunglasses, the white powdered ponytail, the fingerless gloves, the high starched collar — was both armor and artwork, the most ESTP of performances: the real man concealed behind the persona that was more vivid than any costume he designed for others.
Lagerfeld died on February 19, 2019, in Paris, having worked until the final months of his life. He was survived by his cat Choupette — who has her own Instagram account and personal maid — and by one of the largest bodies of work in the history of fashion. His relationship with his weight, which he lost deliberately and publicly in the early 2000s through a diet he subsequently wrote a book about, was characteristic of the ESTP's relationship to the body as a project: something to be shaped, displayed, and managed with the same attention he brought to every other aesthetic object in his life.
