Patrick Hourcade, the former creative director of French Vogue and an expert in 18th-century art, is a man of integrity, decency, wicked humor, and refinement. He was also a most unlikely best friend to Karl Lagerfeld. They met in 1976, when Hourcade was at the apex of his career as a French fashion journalist. In his beautiful and elegant new book, Karl: No Regrets, he peels back the opulent pomp to expose the many layers of complex and often cruel forms of manipulation that Karl Lagerfeld survived on until he died, in February of 2019. Hourcade’s book is part epistle, part memoir, and slithers quickly and with efficient speed in minimal chapters. For 25 years, Hourcade was Lagerfeld’s close male friend, his factotum in every aspect of the self-invented fairy tale. Hourcade and Lagerfeld bonded over their obsession with 18th-century antiques, and together, using Lagerfeld’s always open checkbook, they built magnificent collections at the great designer’s homes—Grand-Champ, a château in Brittany; Hotel Pozzo di Borgo, in Paris; and La Vigie, a villa on the French Riviera. Hourcade’s book is lavishly illustrated with people and places that were integral to the fairy tale, the gilded rooms with wall-to-wall paintings and Versailles rugs, and the incredible decorated beds. This book is essential reading for those who want to know the real Lagerfeld, the one who fell out with so many people he loved, including the Sotheby’s France head Laure de Beauvau-Craon; Gilles Dufour, his right-hand man at Chanel; Inès de la Fressange; and Hourcade. Lagerfeld was generous to all of his friends—until he turned on them. For the last 20 years of his life, Lagerfeld dismissed Hourcade as “a cheat and a liar,” apparently because, in some mysterious way, he considered himself jilted. Read more of my review in @airmailweekly #karllagerfeld #noregrets #thechiffontrenches @hourcade.patrick