Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (Daniel Brühl), left, meets and falls in love with Jacques de Bascher (Théodore Pellerin) in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld . Caroline Dubois, Jour Premier/Disney hide caption We live in an age obsessed with self-creation. Our social media-fueled culture is less about changing the world than about shaping how the world sees us.
Nobody did it any better than Karl Lagerfeld , who died in 2019 after four decades as a lion king in the fashion world. Beginning as a somewhat ridiculous outsider from Germany, Lagerfeld used his genius for self-invention to wind up designing for Fendi , resurrecting the moribund house of Chanel and creating a personal look so distinctive — white hair, dark sunglasses, fingerless gloves and crisp detachable collars — that it could serve as the emoji for Fashion Designer. His hard-won rise in ‘70s Paris is the theme of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld , a smart, dishy, hugely entertaining new French series on Hulu.
The show doesn’t pretend to offer the definitive take on an enormously complicated man. Instead, its brisk six episodes offer emblematic incidents — or perhaps pressure points — that take us surprisingly deep inside a figure who moved constantly forward, spurred on by ambition, loneliness and a keen sense of self-protection. We first meet Karl in Paris through the eyes of Jacques de Bascher, a self-destructive young aristocrat played with scene-stealing charisma by the French Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin.
