On the second episode of the Disney+ original series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, the designer meets the legendary Marlene Dietrich at her Paris apartment. It’s the early 1970s, and the Karl Lagerfeld of then is not quite the one we know and mythologize now. “The Dietrich” is not quite herself either; she had aged and her health had declined after surviving cervical cancer in the ’60s and a stage fall in 1973. Lagerfeld, played with aplomb by a nuanced Daniel Brühl, had just been named artistic director of Chloé after years toiling behind the scenes. He was working on becoming.
After he dangles the possibility of dressing Dietrich, prematurely, as it turns out, Vogue Paris editor Francine Crescent offers a portfolio in the magazine in hopes of photographing the actress. Lagerfeld takes his pitch to a skeptical Dietrich—she does not want to be portrayed as a caricature of her younger self, nor a preemptively memorialized figure—and it prompts one of Lagerfeld’s most revealing moments in the series, and perhaps the most important to deciphering his psyche.
Fueled by his desire to persuade her to help him, Lagerfeld tells Dietrich “I don’t have this body, I don’t have this stature. I’m not 35. It’s what I show the world because it’s what the world wants of me.” An earlier scene depicts Lagerfeld wearing a girdle under his suits and heeled boots with inserts to make him taller. He knows what this moment could mean for his career, and she does too. He tells her that he will present her as she has been, powerful, “with panache.” That he won’t allow her to “wear her misery.”
The exchange defines Becoming Karl Lagerfeld as a story of undeterred and audacious self-invention, a tale of a man who made a deliberate, meticulous choice at every crossing in his life. He chooses to be behind the scenes at first, the story implies, because of his insecurity. He chooses to step into the spotlight, because of his need to compete against and outdo his once close friend Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, and admitted enemy, Pierre Bergé.
The show, in fact, paints Saint Laurent as a godlike figure, first on the cover of a magazine and then at one of his fashion shows. In some moments, it almost feels like Becoming is the story of Saint Laurent (more on that later). In contrast, Lagerfeld is first seen through the eyes of his eventual life companion Jacques de Bascher at a club. He is a someone, but not the one. An underdog. When De Bascher visits a magazine stand to ask for an issue, any issue, featuring Lagerfeld after that first sighting, the clerk says she’s never heard of him.