Chris HeathJun 26, 2026 – 5.00amKarl Lagerfeld, the great German fashion designer, lived in a surreal kind of grandeur. The creative director of Chanel and Fendi, he owned apartments in Paris, Rome and the Côte d’Azur, as well as villas in Biarritz and his native Hamburg; enormous collections of art deco furniture, antique jewellery, and couture garments; a personal library of some 300,000 books, by his own estimation; paintings and sculptures by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and John Baldessari; three Rolls-Royces; a curious assemblage of 509 iPods; and hundreds of pairs of his trademark wraparound sunglasses and fingerless biker gloves.According to a conversation that his biographer, William Middleton, had with the Parisian florist Lachaume, his annual flower budget appears to have been about €1.5 million. Lagerfeld never married or had children, and when he died of cancer in 2019, the press quickly began to speculate about the immense fortune he’d supposedly left behind, which a number of outlets, including Bloomberg, Forbes and The Guardian, estimated at more than $US200 million. Speculation also swirled about where these riches would end up.AtlanticSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Fetching latest articles
Inside the bizarre world of the richest cat in the world
Choupette was the love of Karl Lagerfeld’s life, and the fashion designer is said to have left his pampered pet millions in his will. So where is all the money?
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