Daily Inspiration Quote by Karl Lagerfeld

Lagerfeld is mourning a vanished ecosystem while refusing the comfort of nostalgia. The blunt opening - "No". - reads like a designer’s scissors: decisive, a little impatient with sentimentality. He’s talking about "those people" (the old-school tastemakers: boutique buyers, editors, store curators) as infrastructure, not personalities. They "did something for designers" that department stores "can, could or should" do: cultivate taste, take risks, and build a narrative around new work instead of treating fashion like interchangeable inventory.

The triple modal - can, could, should - is the tell. This isn’t merely a complaint about retail decline; it’s a moral argument about responsibility. Department stores aren’t just unable to perform cultural stewardship, he implies; they’re structurally disincentivized from doing it. Commerce flattens. Curation sharpens.

Then he pivots: "Today the world is different so you have to make it differently". That line carries Lagerfeld’s signature pragmatism. He’s not asking for the past back; he’s insisting designers adapt without confusing adaptation with dilution. The fragmentary finale - "There's TV. There's a lot of things" - is intentionally non-specific, pointing to the bigger enemy: attention dispersion. Media doesn’t just advertise fashion; it changes fashion’s tempo, compresses trends, and rewards immediate legibility.

The subtext is a warning disguised as realism: if the old gatekeepers are gone, designers must either become their own cultural institutions or get swallowed by the retail-media machine that sells visibility as if it were value.