(Paris) After Balenciaga and The New Look, the parade of series on haute couture continues with the arrival Friday on Disney of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, a highly anticipated production on the rise of the fashion star, embodied with finesse by Daniel Brühl.

Adapted from the biography Kaiser Karl by Le Monde journalist Raphaëlle Bacqué, this six-part miniseries follows the designer’s first steps, initially without a ponytail, in Paris in the 1970s as a ready-to-wear mercenary, before he became the iconic couturier of the house of Chanel.

She thus explores her collaboration with Gaby Aghion (Agnès Jaoui), the founder of the Chloé label, her rivalry with Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois), the protégé of Pierre Bergé (Alex Lutz)… and especially her relationship with the dandy Jacques de Bascher (Théodore Pellerin), the great love of his life.

Enough to lift a part of the mystery that Karl Lagerfeld loved to cultivate, who died in 2019 and for the first time at the heart of an audiovisual fiction.  

“He fascinated the whole world”, without us really knowing the man “behind the facade he had created”, Daniel Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin!, Inglourious Basterds) explained to AFP in March. , who did not hesitate long before accepting this role.

Anxious not to fall into caricature, the German-Spanish actor, who trained by speaking “in French with a German accent”, says he had a click when trying on his character’s high-heeled shoes, which made him think “of flamenco and bullfighters,” allowing him to “cling on to the image” of a “matador” before each take.

Directed by Jérôme Salle (Kompromat) and Audrey Estrougo (Suprêmes) and co-created by Isaure Pisani-Ferry (Braqueurs, Kaboul Kitchen), this French production was announced in 2021 by Disney, a year after the implementation of the platform in the hexagon.  

Filmed between Paris, Monaco and Italy, the series brings together more than 2,200 actors in more than 40 settings, for a total of 3,000 costumes, including 160 entirely created by dedicated workshops.

From outfits to makeup, “there is not a detail that is left to chance”, assured AFP Jeanne Damas, founder of the Rouje brand and performer in the series by designer Paloma Picasso, during the Canneseries festival .

This launch comes a few months after those of the Spanish Balenciaga (Disney) dedicated to the eponymous designer, and the American The New Look (Apple TV), on the rise of Christian Dior, illustrating the platforms’ appetite for the subject .

“With hindsight, we are in a real time when fashion is a heritage” and where “we can comfortably look in the rearview mirror” to create stories, said Alex Lutz to justify this trend, in front of journalists, including AFP, in Cannes.

“It’s a very attractive” but also “unhealthy” world where “glamor, hype, pretension but also tragedy, drama and emptiness” coexist, added Daniel Brühl.

Representatives of the industry “created their own characters,” Arnaud Valois told AFP, praising “inexhaustible material for directors and screenwriters.”

It is also a way for platforms to supply their catalogs with local productions, while crossing borders thanks to figures known around the world.  

Gaumont, which co-produced Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, acquired the rights to Raphaëlle Bacqué’s work in October 2019, published earlier in June and quickly becoming a best-seller, translated into several languages.

At the end of 2022, American actor Jared Leto also announced in the American press that he was working on a Karl Lagerfeld biopic.