And now our Karl

Later you will ask where I was when I heard it, about Karl. The moment I restarted my phone because my children (I would say they read books all day, but the reality is different) wanted to watch Pluk van de Petteflet for the seventh time. I enter my login code. Then my SIM. A message from my beloved Calo. The day before yesterday I texted her that Lee Radziwill had passed away. We find each other in many matters, just as we do in living legends like Lee was. I open her message. ‘And now our Karl’, she writes.

I know what it means, but I don't want it. I hope she means something else. A fashion transfer or something. Deep down I really know it. He wasn't at his couture show a month ago. Because a press service simply prefers not to write that someone is dying, a communiqué went out that Lagerfeld was ‘a little tired’. No matter how much I love Chanel, of course no one believed this. Karl was never ‘a little tired’, Karl worked sixteen hours a day. For his beloved Chanel, for Fendi, for his own brand KL and for all the special collaborations he did. As if that wasn't enough, he also photographed so many lookbooks himself.

I quickly type nu.nl. Meanwhile, a child asks for a popsicle. Another asks if I will lie down in the hammock. They sound very far away. The page loads slowly on my phone. I will know at the opening. This is front-page news. If something else comes up, what I fear may not be so.

I think of all the moments I saw him. At all the shows where I was able to watch him from so many beautiful locations and often from the front row as he received the applause. That time I went to the opening of work by Dior and Karl had just left the Grand Palais (he had already visited before the official opening), that time I could almost touch him after that wonderful Métiers d’Art show themed Paris-Bombay and that beautiful evening in July where I saw him drinking a cup of coffee at Senequier in Saint-Tropez.

The page loads. Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (85)… I don't need to read further. I call over my shoulder to my beloved: ‘Karl is dead.’ As if it concerns an intimate friend. And although that is not the case, it still feels a bit like that.

A great figure. Emperor Karl is no more.