THE HISTORY OF FASHION is the history of longing. Nobody is born stylish. Everybody wants to be a little memorable, and some would like to be somebody else, or more like the self we see in the better part of our minds. It’s about one hundred years since fashion took its place alongside literature, painting and music as a way to look for the social essence of one’s era. Proust saw it happening, and, in ‘‘In Search of Lost Time,’’ Madame de Guermantes’s dresses are ‘‘not a casual decoration alterable at will, but a given, poetical reality like that of the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain hour of the day.’’ I tried to recall the passage as I waited for Karl Lagerfeld in his Paris apartment off the Boulevard St. Germain. It was just after 1 p.m., though there is something timeless about the room where he likes to take his lunch. It has blinds and something of an Art Deco ambiance in shades of gray, angular, with spotless glass and candle-scented air, a Jeff Koons sculpture erupting on the table, next to a beautiful drawing for the poster of the 1924 film ‘‘L’Inhumaine.’’
The room is all about the books, lying horizontally on towering shelves that go to the ceiling. Euripides’s ‘‘Electra.’’ Samuel Beckett’s letters. ‘‘A Companion to Arthurian Literature.’’ The poems of Cavafy. ‘‘Alice Faye: A Life Beyond the Silver Screen.’’ ‘‘My problem is I have no experience,’’ said Lagerfeld, who came into the room, shook my hand and dove, at my first mention of the name ‘‘Proust,’’ into the most florid and energetic conversation. ‘‘Because I don’t believe in experience.’’
‘‘You have no past?’’
‘‘Not as far as I remember. For other people, maybe. But personally I make no effort to remember. I like the language in Proust, but not the context. I could say something mean. It’s all — you know — the son of the concierge looking at society people. There was this woman who survived from that group. The wife of a banker, Madame Porgès. They had a huge hôtel particulier in front of the Plaza Athénée hotel, where LVMH is now. She died a hundred years after everyone else. She was not very chic, and people said, ‘She was the last person who could remember a world she was never part of.’ Some couture designer — to be kind I will not say his name — once said to me he liked Proust because Françoise Sagan coached him in the best passages.’’