Aging & Wisdom Quote by Karl Lagerfeld

Refusing the neat label of "French designer" is Karl Lagerfeld doing what he always did best: turning identity into styling, then cutting the seams. The double negative - "No... either" - answers an accusation we don’t even hear, implying a world eager to file him under a nation, a school, a heritage. He bats it away with a shrug that’s also a weapon: "I’m from nowhere". Not rootless in the tragic sense, but strategically unplaceable, a persona engineered for maximum mobility.

The pivot to "European" is the tell. Lagerfeld isn’t rejecting belonging; he’s upgrading it. "European" reads like a luxury brand of citizenship: cosmopolitan, curated, historically freighted but conveniently abstract. Then he adds "old European", a phrase that carries both romance and spite. In the early 2000s, "Old Europe" became a geopolitical insult in U.S. culture-war vocabulary; Lagerfeld flips it into a badge, aligning himself with a pre-national, pre-Instagram idea of sophistication - the continent as salon, archive, and attitude.

Subtextually, he’s arguing for aesthetic authority that transcends borders. Fashion, for Lagerfeld, isn’t folk culture; it’s a transnational system of references, thefts, and reinventions. "From nowhere" also hints at the cost of that freedom: to be endlessly legible as a brand, you make your private origin story illegible. The line works because it’s both an evasion and a declaration: he denies the interviewer their easy category, then supplies a grander one that he alone gets to define.