Sabian .Earth Astrology

The Legend

Our header picture is of the young Karl Lagerfeld at Maison Chloe which is where he began his creative journey in 1964. He stayed there for twenty years, left for about seven years and then returned for another five before leaving permanently to head Maison Chanel (House of Chanel).

As creative director of Chanel, the fashion house founded by Gabrielle Chanel, he redesigned their stodgy designs. Alain Wertheimer, the co-owner of Chanel as his grandfather, Pierre, founded the Maison with its namesake in 1924, asked Lagerfeld to breathe new life into the iconic French house, which had been in sleepy decline since Coco Chanel’s death at 87 in 1971.

Read more: Karl Lagerfeld: Fashion Innovator and Visionary

Lagerfeld obliged in spectacular fashion and reinterpreting the house founder’s iconic tweed skirt suits, little black dresses, and quilted handbags.  “What I love best in life is new starts,” Lagerfeld once said.  Besides his duties for Chanel, Lagerfeld was the creative director of fur and ready-to-wear at Fendi, a position he had assumed in 1965.

He cut an indelible figure with his omnipresent sunglasses, black leather gloves, Chrome Hearts rings, and powdered white ponytail; a stylish takeoff on Andy Warhol. In the early 2000s, he shed nearly 100 pounds to wear the narrow-cut suits designed by Hedi Slimane¹ for Dior Homme, and wrote a book about the process with his doctor, Jean-Claude Houdret, called originally the Spoonlight diet but was renamed for publication, The Karl Lagerfeld Diet.²

Recently, Lagerfeld has used his name to speak out on politics and social commentary, skewering the German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her immigration policies and the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in the wake of his sexual misconduct scandal.

                                                                  The Man

Karl Lagerfeld claimed he was born in 1938.  He says so in the Diet book. Maison Chanel says it was 1933 while the Hambourg Genealogy Society pegged him to being born on September 10, 1935, in Hamburg, Germany, to Otto Lagerfeld and Elisabeth Bahlmann.  We tried them all; HGS was right.

In 1954, at barely 21, Lagerfeld won the International Wool Secretariat in the coat category, sharing the stage with  Yves Saint Laurent, who won for his dress design. The recognition landed Lagerfeld a job with the couturier Pierre Balmain, where he dressed stars including Sophia Loren. After this, he became the head designer at Jean Patou, now just Patou.

In 1963, he began freelancing for Gaby Aghion at Chloë, considered France’s first ready-to-wear label, and took a full-time spot there in 1974, but not before he assumed the creative director job at the Roman furrier label Fendi, a post that he held until his death.

He owned 300 iPods, each one programmed with different music. The only collection he never de-acquisitioned was his “zillions” of books. His home in Biarritz was said to hold “three miles” of them. Such a passionate bibliophile Lagerfeld opened a small bookshop in Paris’s seventh district, 7L in 1999, and the following year launched an imprint with German publisher Steidl.

                              The Chart

We have rectified Herr Lagerfeld’s chart to 01 Libra, “Cyclists racing a high banked track” in the Hyperion Symbols highlighting the accelerated energies that he needed to control for deft application in the competitive world market of high fashion.

Libra is ruled by Venus, which is conjunct the eleventh-twelfth house of spanning large organizations, secret enemies, and the public. It is also a planet of acquisitiveness, and Lagerfeld with his miles of books, hundreds of iPods, and other sundries squirreled away hidden in his house, was nothing but acquisitive.  His Pluto on the tenth-eleventh house cusp shows his ability to transform his career and the House of Chanel into something popular and well-regarded was of of his many feats.

Pluto in Cancer is sextile the Moon, and that was key to him understanding and directing women’s fashion sense. Pluto is also sextile his Ascendant, and his chart shows Lagerfeld loves the dynamic business of fashion particularly as Mercury in Libra is conjunct the Ascendant and by a translation of light sextile Pluto.

Like his couture, Lagerfeld’s chart is well integrated thanks to the Grand Trine in Water that unites the whole. He has an opposition —Saturn to Venus — so he is not a Splay, but more of a locomotive, driving one of the Western half of the chart from his own ambitions and talented resources on the right.

Thus, his natural disposition, is what unites the left and right side of his chart and life, was his desire to please women but also established and monied men for whom he toiled. His seventh house is empty, so collaboration was not his strong suit.

Uranus in Taurus is square the Moon in Aquarius showing how his mother’s cold approval was a driving force for his career and the reversal of the two planets exaltations, that is squared by Mars in its ruler of Scorpio shows how making Mommy look good was something he learned early on and capitalized later upon.

 Venus rules the kidneys and pancreas; therefore , it is no surprise that he suffered from those afflictions. The speculative death chart shows how the cancer had probably lingered for 2.5 years before it was fully acknowledged in Lagerfeld’s last attempt at outmaneuvering the fates.  He died in Paris, on February 19 2019. 

1. While Virginia Viard was the immediate successor to Lagerfeld after his death, she stepped down in 2024 and Hedi Slimane, the original designer who inspired Lagerfeld’s weight loss and lifestyle change, is slated to follow. ↩︎
2. The book while available on Amazon for $59.00 can also be viewed on Archive.org for free. ↩︎