Rare 1970s Karl Lagerfeld design for Chloe Handbag

More than a mere tastemaker, Karl Lagerfeld devoted himself to the continual pursuit of chic. “My life and my job,” the designer once said, “is to forget myself.” During his five-decade career designing shoes, handbags, evening dresses and other items for Chanel, Fendi, Chloé and many others, Lagerfeld was a quintessential chameleon, ever evolving to embody the times.

An outsize, instantly recognizable personality — his ponytail powdered like an 18th-century viscount, his eyes perpetually shielded by dark glasses, wearing fistfuls of chunky silver jewels — Lagerfeld was, above all, an avatar of style.

Born in Hamburg (in 1933, ’35, or ’38 by varying accounts), Karl Lagerfeld packed his bags for Paris in 1954. His design for a coat won him the International Wool Secretariat and landed him a job with the celebrated couturier Pierre Balmain. He went on to become the designer of Jean Patou, eventually realizing that his seemingly endless ideas could fuel a career as a designer-for-hire. As such, Lagerfeld lent his vision to everyone from Loewe and Max Mara to Krizia and Charles Jourdan, nimbly moving among a diverse range of styles. It was an unprecedented way of working in the days when freelance was still a dirty word.

During the late ’60s and ’70s, he refashioned Chloé to reflect the free spirit of the day and, beginning in 1965, joined forces with the Fendi family, taking it from sleepy furrier to fashion’s haute-est stratum. Because of his track record for reviving and reimagining brands that had grown stagnant, in 1983 Lagerfeld was handed the reins at Chanel, which had been gathering dust since its founder’s heyday.

From Lagerfeld's first Chanel collection, he injected the venerable house with a frisson of modernity. He riffed on its iconography — tweed skirt suits, pearls, camellias — accenting a lexicon of Chanel-isms with tastes of the moment. Despite producing eight collections a year for Chanel, as well as four to five for Fendi, Lagerfeld never faltered in proposing new ideas each time he put pencil to paper.

Lagerfeld’s collections for Chanel, in particular, displayed his knack for synthesizing old and new, high and low. From Watteau (Spring/Summer 1985 couture) and Serge Roche (Spring/Summer 1990 ready-to-wear) to hip-hop fly girls (Fall/Winter 1991 ready-to-wear), surfers (Spring/Summer 2003 ready-to-wear) and ancient Egypt (Pre-Fall 2019), Lagerfeld used each season’s inspiration to conceive Chanel’s signatures anew.

Browse a collection of sophisticated designs by Karl Lagerfeld on 1stDibs, including handbags and evening gowns for Chanel, vintage cocktail dresses for Chloé and more.

A part of the Left Bank intellectual crowd who shared her mother’s fondness for fashion, Chloé cofounder Gaby Aghion was inspired to empower independent working women to break from the conservative dress of the 1950s and don more free-spirited, feminine designs that were appropriate for both work and social life.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Aghion established her fashion house in Paris in 1952 with her business partner Jacques Lenoir to develop her own source of income, separate from her husband’s. She was one of the first designers to embrace the concept of luxury prêt-à-porter as a middle ground between haute couture and off-the-rack for the masses.

In 1964, Aghion hired a fledgling Karl Lagerfeld as a designer. The pair would bring Chloé into the international spotlight with their easy yet glamorous lines that drew such fans as Jacqueline Kennedy. Lagerfeld became the staff creative lead at Chloé in 1974 and stayed with the brand until 1983, during which time he became known for his romantic silk dresses that continued Aghion’s feminine vision and were a favorite of the “rich hippie” set. In 1988, then-unknown designer Martine Sitbon took the helm of Chloé for several years before Lagerfeld returned as creative director from 1992 to 1997, drawing all of the iconic 1990s supermodels to his runway.

After his second departure, Chloé tapped yet another early-career designer to lead the label: a punky 25-year-old Stella McCartney, who earned the position not because of her famous lineage (she’s the daughter of Paul and Linda McCartney), but because of her fashion education at Central Saint Martins and work experience on London’s Savile Row and at Christian Lacroix. Following McCartney’s exit to launch her own line in 2001 — not long after introducing the diffusion label See by Chloé that year — Chloé named Phoebe Philo to the post.

Under Philo’s leadership, Chloé expanded from women’s clothing to an accessories line — including handbags — and debuted the legendary Paddington bag in 2005. The padlocked satchel, notorious for weighing a hefty three pounds while empty, became one of the “It bags” of the decade (the brand’s double-handled Marcie holds its own in that regard); the entire 8,000-bag initial production run sold out via preorders.

Philo left Chloé in 2006; her successors include, among others, Clare Waight Kelle and Natacha Ramsay-Levi, who announced that she would be departing the house in late 2020. Part of Chloé’s decades-long lasting influence — which we’d like to speculate would appease Aghion greatly — is the brand’s dedication as a career-launching platform for newbie designers, particularly women.

Browse an extraordinary inventory of vintage Chloé handbags, day dresses, shoes and more on 1stDibs.