FOR three weeks in October, London's Saatchi Gallery will undergo a personality change, morphing from a clinical, white-walled, contemporary-art venue into the richly textured world of Coco Chanel with Mademoiselle Privé, an exhibition of the original designer's stylish orbit. Chanel, who died in 1971, was the woman who created the template for both the business and the lifestyle that so many of today's designers wish to emulate. Her hugely successful creations - the neat bouclé tweed jackets, the braided leather- and chain-handled quilted bags, the double-C logo, the famous perfumes (the list goes on and on) still exist in ever more profitable quantities today. And her glamorous, extravagant existence - with whole mornings spent at maquillage in her permanent suite at the Ritz, exquisite homes, wealthy lovers and legendarily immaculate entertaining - has become part of the compelling mythology which supports this astoundingly successful fashion house.

Lagerfeld sits at a large white desk at one end of the room, the surface covered with crayons, iPhones and photographs from the show's press dossier. At one corner of the desk Amanda Harlech is positioned, dressed in Celia Birtwell-print chiffon and smoking a cigarette as she provides a stream of endorsement and repartee. Like a human echo, she amplifies his curt pronouncements, projecting them into the room and back to visitors like myself or, today, the constant parade of actresses and models presenting themselves to Karl for the final verdict.
It is Lagerfeld, with his seemingly unquenchable energy, who has consistently raised the bar for fashion shows, not only creating ever-larger visual spectacles but also adding more to the calendar, such as Chanel's Métiers d'Art（楼主注：香家高级手工坊系列，说白了就是早秋系列） - an annual tribute to the rich craftsmanship of the house held in a different city each autumn - and the travelling cruise shows such as that held in Seoul in May. Now other houses have followed suit, to the extent that there is scarcely a month when journalists are not required to travel around the world to an exotic destination to see a single, lavish, publicity-generating fashion show. Asked whether he feels this proliferation of activity - with the accompanying demands on designers to create more and more - is a force for the good, his answer is emphatic.

"If you think it's too many, you don't take those contracts. You know, I hate the designers who take the money and then go, [he gasps theatrically] 'It's too much!' For me, it's normal. But I'm not normal so I don't know. I like to do it. I don't have to force myself." Nor does he care that this original idea has been copied by other labels. "As long as I have done it before. It's OK with me."
The concept for tomorrow's couture show is the Chanel casino. While the 67 models wearing his couture collection perambulate around the set, which is being erected in the Grand Palais, the centrepiece will be the gaming tables peopled by Lagerfeld's celebrity gamblers sporting the outfits and jewellery of the Mademoiselle Privé exhibit. Each personality is to have their own specifically designed look which will simultaneously show off the diamond jewellery they will wear - from a re-edition of the only fine-jewellery collection Coco Chanel ever made, seen once in 1932 and then dismantled. The show is a typical Karl concept, cannily and theatrically combining everything he needs to achieve - publicity for the exhibition, an early viewing of the jewellery, a whole autumn couture collection and a theatrical spectacular that will be shared by the relatively small couture audience via social media to take it global. The card-motif carpet, the Chanel chips, the roulette wheel, even Chanel slot machines… All are heady Instagram fodder, and that's before Julianne Moore, Lara Stone, Kristen Stewart, Vanessa Paradis and Rita Ora walk in and take their seats pour faire leurs jeux.（楼主注：其中提到的高定秀指的是15秋冬高定）

His mother, Lagerfeld says, was a gambler. His father would buy houses in different districts of Germany in order to prevent her gambling because it was illegal to gamble where you lived. At one point he liked casinos himself (he spends time in Monaco, one of the world's gambling capitals), but he never visits them now. "They have changed. Now they are sloppy. You get the feeling the people there have to pay the rent with what they win," he says. There will be none of that feeling in tomorrow's Chanel Casino where the celebrity gamblers have been vetted by Lagerfeld. Several are the children of women he has collaborated with for many years - Violette, Ines de la Fressange's daughter, whom he presents with a new iPod after her fitting ("She has not the same pocket money"), or Lily-Rose Depp, the 16-year-old daughter of Vanessa Paradis and Johnny Depp, who has just fronted a Chanel eyewear campaign and who comes in to kiss him goodbye in a skimpy cotton vest and jeans, as tiny and kittenish as her mother was. Others are names of the moment, such as Girlsstar Jemima Kirke.

For a designer with a huge fashion show taking place in just over 12 hours, Karl appears relaxed. He sits upright at his desk, his hands constantly moving as around him flutter the team - adjusting hems, tweaking hair, adding and taking away accessories - before standing in groups silently awaiting his verdict as each girl appears. The couture models are presented with the asymmetric black bobs Karl has asked über-hairstylist Sam McKnight to create and the highly rouged Kabuki-style cheeks of the show's make-up, and he treats them with a cool, friendly politesse. He is particularly excited by a jacket designed by a 3D computer, made of a fused powder that is light and tough, with a quilted surface and piping. "The idea is to take the most iconic jacket of the 20th century and make it in a way that couldn't have been made until the 21st," he explains. It is one of the zillions of ideas that pop into and out of his mind and mouth all day, every day, and that enable him to design not only for Chanel but also for his Karl Lagerfeld label and the house of Fendi. All three houses bear common elements from their shared designer - a fondness for large lapels and sloping shoulders, a substantial Teutonic sensibility that embraces tailoring and structure, often an A-line silhouette - but each, too, has a completely individual identity.

"I never mix them up in my mind. That is the secret of the story. First of all, I prefer not to analyse why or why not. I have the feeling that when I am doing Fendi I am another person to when I am doing Chanel or my own line. I have no personality. I have three," he quips in his rapid mode. "I never ask myself questions. I try to find answers. It's a very pretentious line, no? I am in a way like a machine. I have electronic flashes, it's true." Amanda elaborates: "It's like Karl puts the questions into the computer and then it just goes 'Bam!'"（最后一句笑死我了）
Amanda Harlech is one of the small coterie of people that surrounds Karl in a relationship that is part bodyguard, part employee and part companion. She, 40-year-old Sébastien (his right-hand man whom he has known since he was 15)（楼主注：指的应该是老佛爷的保镖兼助理兼男宠Sébastien Jondeau） and a few others have been an integral part of his life for several decades - working, holidaying, travelling, gossiping, informing and inspiring. He has no computer, and though he has something of an iPhone habit, the devices contain a very limited number of contacts (but an extensive collection of photographs of his beloved cat, Choupette).

这只喵叫Choupette，也可以叫它为Choupette Lagerfeld。在喵星人的国度里应该是一位优雅的小姐，她具体有多受宠我就不说了，自己百度吧，看了只会让你怀疑这失败的人生。

Instead this close group are his messengers and mouthpieces, conduits to the world outside Lagerfeldland. "Most of these people have never worked for someone else. Amanda, she worked for other people but we forget that [a joking reference to her early collaboration with John Galliano]. I think the people around me I can really trust. Even the people in my house. My maids. Or Choupette's."
"Choupette's handmaidens," says Amanda, adding her familiar verbal fairy dust to Lagerfeld's clipped vocabulary. "But I love to be alone," continues Karl. "If you are sick and old with no money then it must be hard, but in my case it is the height of luxury to be alone."
Lagerfeld is famous for being intolerant of the concept of age. In this he mirrors the opinion of his predecessor, whose diktats on the subject were frequent. "A woman has the age she deserves" and "Ageing is a state of mind, one must keep enthusiasm and curiosity" are two such utterances quoted by Bronwyn Cosgrave in her Vogue on Coco Chanel biography, in which she also informs us that the designer was famous for her love of spa cures, pep pills and vitamins. Lagerfeld would appear to have little time for spa cures (I don't know about the vitamins), although he does like the bracing Atlantic air of Biarritz.

We discuss the print of Amanda's dress and how the collaboration between Birtwell and Ossie Clark was a "moment". "And this is what Karl knows," Amanda emphasises. "You have a moment and then you move on. You keep moving." "I am born to survive," he agrees, keeping an eye on a model approaching to show the back of a jacket floating away from the spine. I flippantly suggest that, in this case, maybe his DNA would be useful for research. "But you know, I was asked by somebody to do this," he bats back. "Because they think I'm not normal. But I flatly refused. Unique pieces are unique pieces. But I think very flattering, huh? And also I was asked for skincare for men because they think I am remade. But I am not remade. I am all fake but not remade." He removes his Chrome Hearts sunglasses to reveal the unlined skin below his eyes, and pulls his ponytail away from his neck. "No scars," offers Amanda, as proudly as if she were talking about her own skin. "My mother, when I was 24, called me and said, 'From now on, it goes downhill,'" says Lagerfeld. "But, you know, I never went to bed without washing my face. But I think I also inherit. My mother had impeccable skin."（臭美吧你，骚老头）

Lagerfeld frequently refers to his childhood. The family included a sister and a half-sister but he describes himself as "the only liked child. My parents weren't interested. They put them in school and they married when they came out. I could do what I wanted but I was an easy child. They were troublemakers. I only sketched and wanted to learn languages so I spoke French when I was six（厉害，惊人的语言天赋！不过他老爸似乎更牛。）." He claims his father spoke nine languages including Chinese and Russian, the latter as a result of a period in Russia doing business. "My father lived in Vladivostok and he regretted that he wasn't Russian. He wanted me to be Russian. We had to eat borscht once a week because he loved it. I hate Russian food. I like the idea of Russia but I hate what it has become today."
He also hated school, leaving when he was young before winning the famous International Wool Secretariat prize in 1954 at the age of 21. "Balmain, who was one of the judges, asked me if I wanted to work in his studio and my parents said, 'Yes, OK, but if it doesn't work, then you go back to school.' So I worked because I hate to be taught. I like to teach myself. And I'm pretty cultivated." Despite being in Paris as the fashion world embraced pre-Aids, post-sexual liberation in a hard-partying whirl, Lagerfeld avoided the burn-out and other tragedies that affected so many of his peers. "I think I'm lazy and I could do more, and better. But, you know, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I have never taken drugs. It's something I don't need or don't want. I wouldn't say that I always watch other people but in a way I have always been apart. In the Sixties and Seventies, if you were not drinking and smoking and taking drugs, it was difficult. But I was never part of anything. I like the idea that I was behind a glass wall that protected me."