I found this very interesting article where Mr Lagerfeld (le major freak) talks about how the German Werkbund style fits more with his New York space rather than Paris. In my humble opinion Industrial fits very well with romantisim; it is an interesting contrast...but well, he sells his dogmas like nobody else!
"How do you live with your art?
I had beautiful Old Master paintings; I sold them all. But now I have a collection—it’s not on the wall—that I really love, of German posters from 1905 to 1915. They are the beginning of modern advertising, like huge Pop-art paintings, with unbelievable colors and modernity. They show the strangest products: AEG electrical equipment, coal, chocolate, sometimes fairs, or exhibitions. But they are divine, and they are impossible to find.
Where do you find them?
I get all the catalogues, and I have people who buy for me. The other day, one of them said, “You cannot pay $50,000 for a poster.” I bought it for nearly $80,000, and a week after, at a sale in New York, a poster by the same artist—not as good—went for $120,000.
But you don’t hang them on the wall.
I want to put them in my place in New York. They don’t work in France; it’s not a French style at all. I will do the New York apartment in the style of the [Deutscher] Werkbund, the architectural movement that had designers like Bruno Paul, Hermann Muthesius and Peter Behrens, who taught Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. They did modern things differently, in 1910, before the Bauhaus. I have a collection of furniture bought 20 years ago that is stunning, very colorful, in bright red, yellow, green and gold. Suddenly people are discovering Werkbund. Everyone knows Vienna Secession, but there is not much left. Werkbund is Germany for me, a Germany that I can identify with."
