For the majority of their careers, Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent, both titans of French fashion, were foils to one another. These two immensely different talents and their competition with one another helped define not only fashion, but what it meant to be a fashion designer in the 20th century. Their parallel journeys began in 1954 when both designers, Lagerfeld, then 21, and Saint Laurent, then 18, entered the prestigious International Wool Secretariat (now known as the International Woolmark prize) design competition in Paris. While Lagerfeld won first prize in the coat category, Saint Laurent nabbed the highest distinction, taking home the top honors in the evening gown category.
Though the two designers were ostensibly in competition with one another, at one point they were friendly—or at the very least, frenemies. In The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris, author Alicia Drake relays a scathing interview that Lagerfeld gave to a French magazine where he compares the Saint Laurent of the 1980s to the one he once knew.
In Marie Ottavi's biography of de Bascher, Jacques de Bascher, Dandy de l'ombre (“Jacques de Bascher, Shadow Dandy,”) Lagerfeld was frank about his deep affection for de Bascher, despite their starkly different lifestyles and interests.
