Have you stopped to think about your reading pile lately? We’re sorry, but you’re just a fan. “If you come to my house,” said Karl Lagerfeld in a 2015 interview, “I will make you walk through books.” We are very afraid that the famous designer was not exaggerating one bit: if we trust his estimate (and we have no choice ), the Kaiser of fashion He accumulated some 300,000 books before his death., which occurred on February 19, 2019. Only in Librairie 7L, his Parisian bookstore, Lagerfeld stored a tenth of that collection, arranged along multiple walls, tables, shelves, clever spaces and, of course, floors, since That was the place he most liked to work during the last years of his life. To set foot in there, the protagonist of the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast (1991) would think you were in Valhalla, but some say that some of Karl Lagerfeld’s other famous residences, such as his mansion in Vermont (United States) or his Arc Deco-style house on Quai Voltaire, just a three-minute walk from the Librairie 7L, were also the earthly paradise of every bibliophile.
We don’t know exactly when this hobby started, but we do know that the greatest historical lover of black leather jackets (more than a hobby, it was a formal relationship with the garment) established its bookstore as its main base of operations in 1999, after leaving his home in Biarritz and his apartment on the also nearby Rue de l’Université. It was then that those 30,000 volumes, which he had distributed between his two former homes, found a permanent refuge in Librairie 7L, whose largest room was soon also used by Lagerfeld as a photographic studio, meeting room and office. As for the other 270,000 books in her considerable private collection, no one knows for sure where they are, nor whether the guy was simply teasing us with an incredibly exaggerated figure. If true, Karl Lagerfeld would have gone down in history as one of the greatest literary collectors of all time, if not the greatest. The only rival that comes to mind is Thomas Phillipps, an eccentric 19th-century British antiquarian so fond of print that he apparently became obsessed with owning a copy of every work published in the world, not counting manuscripts and alternative editions. All in all, Phillipps stayed at 100,000, numbers that make him look like a sad amateur next to Lagerfeld.
“Nowadays,” he once declared, “I only collect books. I have no room left for anything else.” Implicit in that sentence is the confession that, especially for a workaholic like him, there was also no space, nor time, to read such a number of pages. The Japanese have a word for it: ““tsundoku”or the action of compulsively acquiring large quantities of literary material… which then unfailingly remains parked in a corner of the house without anyone ever touching it. We do not mean by this that Karl Lagerfeld was allergic to reading –in fact, he had a reputation for devouring every volume of fashion or poetry anthology that came into his hands–, but no human being on this or any other plane of reality can combine a position as creative director at Chanel for 36 years with a more or less elevated reading habit without imploding in the attempt.
Nowadays, Librairie 7L is being carried directly by Chanel, which has turned it into a multipurpose cultural space with a certain museum component. In addition to hosting literary presentations, exhibitions, concerts, mini-parades, debates and all kinds of events, the bookstore also continues to function as, well, a bookstore, specializing (not surprisingly) in everything to do with haute couture and visual arts. If you want to know what their best-selling titles are, we recommend taking a look at their website, where you will also see a few photos of those walls full of books… Imagine sneaking in there one night and reading the handwritten notes that its owner must have left in some of them. Yeah the biographical series that Disney+ premieres this June does not include at least a couple of scenes per chapter in which Daniel Brühl trips over a mountain of old copies while walking around the house, we will send a formal protest to the Mouse House.
