We live in an age obsessed with self-creation. Our social media-fueled culture is less about changing the world than about shaping how the world sees us.
Nobody did it any better than Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019 after four decades as a lion king in the fashion world. Beginning as a somewhat ridiculous outsider from Germany, Lagerfeld used his genius for self-invention to wind up designing for Fendi, resurrecting the moribund house of Chanel and creating a personal look so distinctive — white hair, dark sunglasses, fingerless gloves and crisp detachable collars — that it could serve as the emoji for Fashion Designer.
His hard-won rise in ‘70s Paris is the theme of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, a smart, dishy, hugely entertaining new French series on Hulu. The show doesn’t pretend to offer the definitive take on an enormously complicated man. Instead, its brisk six episodes offer emblematic incidents — or perhaps pressure points — that take us surprisingly deep inside a figure who moved constantly forward, spurred on by ambition, loneliness and a keen sense of self-protection.
We first meet Karl in Paris through the eyes of Jacques de Bascher, a self-destructive young aristocrat played with scene-stealing charisma by the French Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin. Always looking for distractions, Jacques fixates on the uncharismatic Karl — that’s the superb German actor Daniel Brühl — who at this point is something of a brainy schlub who lives with his acerbic mother and stuffs his face with sweets when he’s angry. You know you’re watching a French series, not an American one, when, in this show’s equivalent of a meet cute, Jacques and Karl discover their affinity by quoting the daunting Austrian novelist Robert Musil.
Jacques dreams of being a great writer, but he fritters away his gifts in drink and drugs and sex; he yearns for love. Although Karl cares for him, he’s too relentless a work-machine to provide such consolations. Karl never stops hustling and scheming. He’s chasing a stardom to equal his one-time-friend, now-nemesis Yves Saint Laurent — that’s a terrific Arnaud Valois — who’s celebrated as a haute-couture genius with his own label while Karl toils away on ready-to-wear for the house of Chloe.
