Article and images excerpted from artinfo.com

By Jean Bond Rafferty

Karl Lagerfeld is famously a man of many parts: a Hamburg-born fashion icon whose vision of modernity is still revitalizing the legendary French house of Chanel after 25 years, an art photographer whose recent pictures of the Château de Versailles’s park in winter evoke almost human emotions from the stone statuary and an instinctive connoisseur who has outfitted a plethora of homes in such spots as Hamburg, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, Rome and Paris with the finest examples of “things I like,” including 18th-century French furniture, Old Master paintings and Art Deco and Memphis design items. Lagerfeld’s deftness with decor has made him an avant-garde trendsetter with a wide following. His influence is reflected in the prices his collections command when sold at auction, often fetching two or three times the estimates.

One of Lagerfeld’s latest projects is the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, a traveling contemporary-art show that he conceived as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Chanel handbag and whose exhibition space he commissioned the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Zaha Hadid to design. For the pavilion’s first stops, in Hong Kong and Tokyo, French curator Fabrice Bousteau chose original installations inspired by the emblematic purse and created by 20 contemporary artists, including Nobuyoshi Araki, from Japan; Blue Noses, from Russia; Daniel Buren and Sophie Calle, from France; Subodh Gupta, from India; and David Levinthal, from the United States. On October 20, the show swoops into New York’s Central Park, where it will remain until November 9. Next year it will travel to London and Moscow, finishing up in Paris in 2010.

Jean Bond Rafferty caught up with Lagerfeld in the Chanel studio on Paris’s Rue Cambon. He was putting the final touches on the 2008–09 couture collection but took the time to reveal the raison d’être of the Lagerfeld lifestyle.

You are working at a Jean Prouvé desk. We are sitting on Prouvé chairs.  When did you discover his designs?

You know, I bought Prouvé 20 years ago, when nobody wanted him. These were made for a school. I also have a set of 40 chairs and 10 tables from his first known public work, for the Crédit Lyonnais bank. I bought them for nearly nothing from a very good dealer, Anne Sophie Duval, who unfortunately just died. Now people ask me for a chair, and I give them as gifts.

Are you always way ahead of the curve?

The biggest, most beautiful classic paintings—by Impressionists, by Surrealists (whom I hate), by Expressionists (whom I have) and even modern art, like Pollock—were not expensive when they were made. Now you buy them for a fortune, and you have only a few excuses, or no excuse [for waiting]: You didn’t have the money to buy even cheaply 30 years ago, or you are an idiot and you are blind.  Or you like the idea of putting something on the wall and everybody knows how much you paid for it. It’s up to you to adjust to the period. You can fight for the past, or like me, you can be a healthy opportunist and go to the next step.

You move on quickly.

I hope so. I’m a fashion person. I change clothes, furniture, houses, collections. Life is about change. There is a moment when things cannot become any better; then you change. There is no feeling of home in my house. I don’t have those feelings. I am utterly free, European, free-minded, and I have no sense of possession. But to have no sense of possession is easier if you have owned a lot.

You keep nothing when you sell these things?

I keep things like a joke, the furniture of my childhood home.

That’s your Rosebud, à la Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane?

In a way. I’ve kept the pieces, but I don’t use them. They are too tiny for me. It’s a very beautiful set of Biedermeier furniture—the desk where I learned how to write and how to sketch, even the paintings my mother put there that weren’t good enough for her, the leftovers, the German Romantic paintings.