Delevingne, who regularly worked with Lagerfeld, defended the designer, telling Jamil in now-deleted tweets to “just go home” and “stop bashing people for attention”.
But it is hard to dismiss some of the controversies in which the designer found himself embroiled.
In 2017, he and actress Meryl Streep got in a bitter dispute when he claimed Streep had rejected one of his dresses. He later issued a statement of regret for the comments, but Streep’s anger remained undimmed. In another controversy, Chanel had to apologise to the Muslim community in 1994 when Lagerfeld created several dresses printed with verses from the Koran.
Here are some other controversial moments courtesy of the designer.
On #MeToo
“I’m fed up with it,” Lagerfeld told French fashion magazine Numéro last year of the movement against sexual harassment and assault.
“What shocks me most in all of this are the starlets who have taken 20 years to remember what happened. Not to mention the fact there are no prosecution witnesses.”
And while discussing allegations against a magazine creative director who was accused of yanking models’ breasts and pulling their underwear down during shoots without asking them, Lagerfeld added, “If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model! Join a nunnery.”
On Adele
English singer-songwriter Adele now has 15 Grammy Awards among dozens of other honours. But apparently her talent, fame and good looks weren’t enough for Lagerfeld. “She is a little too fat, but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice,” he told Metro Paris in 2012.
After much backlash, the designer apologised and told Metro, “I’d like to say to Adele that I am your biggest admirer. Sometimes when you take a sentence out of the article it changes the meaning of the thought.”
On Heidi Klum
Lagerfeld added to the trashing of fellow countrywoman Heidi Klum by German designer Wolfgang Joop in 2009.
After Joop said Klum was “no runway model” and “she is simply too heavy and has too big a bust”, Lagerfeld claimed, “I don’t know Heidi Klum. She was never known in France.” By then, the supermodel had already been on the cover of Vogue magazine several times, was a Victoria’s Secret Angel, and was host, judge and executive producer of the fashion-themed reality TV show Project Runway.
On curvy women
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone aware of his other comments, but Lagerfeld didn’t want curvy women on the catwalk.
“No one wants to see curvy women,” he reportedly told German magazine Focus in 2009. “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly.”
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