Karl Lagerfeld and Pierre Bergé, the story of the “cruelest hatred” in the world of fashion that ended the friendship of the Kaiser and Yves Saint Laurent

It was the iconic fashion editor Suzy Menkes who was the first to dare to outline their antagonism, establishing a simile with one of the great legends – often denied – about artistic envy in history: “Karl began to be the Salieri against the Mozart that he was. Saint Laurent. Exchanging the imperial Vienna of the 18th century for the Paris of the 1970s and music for fashion, the truth is that recent history cannot be understood without the well-documented antagonism between Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Two fashion geniuses whose paths crossed when they were almost teenagers when they both won the first prize of the International Wool Secretariat in 1954. Although the Kaiser maintained that they had maintained a long friendship over time, the truth is that the dazzling success of the Algerian in contrast to Lagerfeld’s discreet beginnings, a disputed love and two egos almost as big as his own work separated their trajectories. But there is one person who played a key role in the distance between the two of them never being corrected and whose influence in both of their lives will play a fundamental role in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld (Disney+, premiere June 7), the next series about the former creative director of Chanel. That was Pierre Bergé, known for years as the “pitbull of fashion.”

“Karl’s problem, and the same thing happens with two movie stars, is this: one becomes Marilyn Monroe and the other is nobody. I really like Karl, I’ve known him forever. He is a really cultured and intelligent person. But his real problem is that he has never had success with his own brand. And that he has never been able to achieve the level of success on his own that he has achieved under the Chanel name. And that’s sad”, confessed Bergé to Menkes herself in the American edition of the magazine Vogue in 2015. The man who was Saint Laurent’s right-hand man, co-founder of the eponymous brand and the designer’s romantic partner for decades, was never a friend of political correctness. The calls to succeed Yves as creative compasses of his own firm can give good faith to his severity and dogmatism: after reducing Tom Ford to the labels of “fiasco” and “pure marketing”, he dispatched Stefano Pilati, describing him as “the absolutely nothing.”

Karl’s problem, and the same thing happens with two movie stars, is this: one becomes Marilyn Monroe and the other is nobody. I really like Karl, but the real problem with him is that he has never had success with his own brand.

Pierre Berge

And Bergé was lying when he said that he really liked Karl. The antipathy between them was such that, according to the Kaiser himself, they went 40 years without speaking a word. “You would have to keep his old books. He is from another era. He should adapt to the times, the times don’t have to adapt to him. And if he doesn’t like them, then he would do well to shut up and retire,” he replied the designer in WWD after the accusations leveled against him by the businessman. Comparisons with Saint Laurent, aka Marilyn Monroe always had a complex and when she finally managed to succeed in the industry post without remorse against him: “I don’t like this Yves in particular because I met another one, very funny and with a great sense of humor (…) But he only had one desire at that time… to be rich and famous.”

“Lagerfeld and Bergé started out as friends. They shared Bergé’s love of books, but their relationship deteriorated over time. Bergé saw Yves Saint Laurent as an artist and a genius, but not Lagerfeld, and he made him feel that way. He also despised his German roots, in contrast to Yves’s French taste. Karl told me that he felt that his friendship with Yves had been destroyed by Bergé and he probably played a role in estrangement from him. For Bergé there was only one place at the top of the pyramid and it was for Yves,” he explains to S Fashion Marie Ottavi, journalist and author of Carl, the celebrated biography of the designer published in Spain by the publishing house Superflua.

The main reason for their enmity is a love triangle that Bergé never approved, with the dandy Jacques de Bascher at the center of it. This Parisian aristocrat maintained a platonic relationship for two decades with Lagerfeld, free and without physical contact, until his death from AIDS in 1989. They were two opposite personalities: while the couturier was a working man, puritan and allergic to parties; The enthralling De Bascher enjoyed alcohol, drugs and orgies daily. “He was the funniest and most different person I have ever met. Wild, chic and fun. He had all the flaws and all the qualities. For me he was divine, but others found him diabolical,” the designer alleged.

In those nights of hedonism and debauchery he would meet Saint Laurent, a tormented genius who also made excess his way of life, much to the chagrin of Bergé, who broke off their romantic relationship when he found himself unable to ‘channel’ the designer. The writer Alicia Drake revealed in her book The Beautiful Fall that Yves had a brief affair with Jacques de Bascher, with the knowledge of a non-possessive Lagerfeld. And it was precisely this one who recognized that Bergé always thought that he had been the instigator behind the union of two souls with a tendency toward self-destruction: “I had had a 20-year friendship with Yves, but Pierre tore it to pieces. He said that I had engineered the relationship between them to destabilize the Saint Laurent house.”

“The relationship between them was devastating because Yves fell madly in love with Jacques and it had an impact on his work,” adds Ottavi, underlining the extreme vigilance that Bergé exercised over Yves’ excesses to prevent the heart of his textile empire from stopping beating. “If their romance had become serious it could have disturbed the entire YSL house and also Bergé’s authority. But his story was purely sexual. Although Bergé thought that Lagerfeld had orchestrated everything, seeing him as the organizer of the romance is going a bit far. He just found it amusing to see the chaos he caused.” Be that as it may, the friendly relationship between the creatives perished forever when De Bascher joined the equation.

This passionate episode will be one of the dramatic centers of the series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. Actor Daniel Brühl plays the Hamburg designer during his years of struggle to reach the top of haute couture and become head of Chanel, with his relationship with Saint Laurent, De Bascher and Bergé as the axes of that vital journey and professional. Not even after the death of the first two, Bergé and Lagerfeld offered a truce to their long confrontation. “That their mutual hatred became public only accentuated the resentment between them. In my books I describe the atrocities that were said and it was very cruel,” concludes Ottavi. “Yves Saint Laurent was a pioneer and invented pieces that will go down in fashion history, but his genius closed on him like a trap. Karl remained connected to the times, reinvented himself and breathed new life into Chanel, that sleeping beauty that he managed to modernize. Each one had their own arguments…”