[custom_adv] Karl Otto Lagerfeld (10 September 1933 – 19 February 2019) was a German creative director, fashion designer, artist, photographer and caricaturist who lived in Paris. [custom_adv] He was known as the creative director of the French fashion house Chanel (from 1983 until his death), as well as creative director of the Italian fur and leather goods fashion house Fendi and his own eponymous fashion label. [custom_adv] Over the decades, he collaborated on a variety of fashion and art-related projects. He was recognized around the world for his white hair, black sunglasses, fingerless gloves, and high starched collars. [custom_adv] Lagerfeld was born on 10 September 1933 in Hamburg, Germany, and was the son of businessman Otto Lagerfeld (1881–1967) and his wife Elizabeth (née Bahlmann; 1897–1978). [custom_adv] His father owned a company that produced and imported evaporated milk, while his maternal grandfather Karl Bahlmann was a local politician for the Catholic Centre Party.His family belonged to the Old Catholic Church. When she met his father, Lagerfeld's mother was a lingerie saleswoman from Berlin. His parents were married in 1930. [custom_adv] Lagerfeld was known to misrepresent his birth year, claiming to be younger than his actual age, and to misrepresent his parents' background. For example, he claimed that he was born in 1938 to "Elisabeth of Germany" and Otto Ludwig Lagerfeldt from Sweden, although these claims have been conclusively proven to be entirely wrong, as his father was from Hamburg and spent his entire life in Germany, with no Swedish connection whatsoever. [custom_adv] There is also no evidence that his mother Elisabeth Bahlmann, the daughter of a middle-class local politician, called herself "Elisabeth of Germany." He was known to insist that no one knows his real birth date. In an interview on French television in February 2009, Lagerfeld said that he was "born neither in 1933 nor 1938."
