Inside Karl Lagerfeld’s weird, often cruel world, ahead of the Met Gala

“Kaiser” Karl Lagerfeld courted European royalty and counted the very cream of fashion among his closest friends.

The divisive late designer famously made Kim Kardashian cry, but he would also would spend hours on the phone to Lindsay Lohan giving her advice when she was at her lowest ebb, friends of the actress told Page Six.

On Monday night, the longtime Chanel couturier will be feted at the Met Gala by his friend, Vogue queen bee Anna Wintour, for the new exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”

Kardashian — who this week posted photos of herself cuddling up to Lagerfeld’s famous pampered Burmese cat, Choupette (to whom he left a bulk of his estimated $220 million fortune in 2019) at his Paris studio — will be on the red carpet and has been planning her dress for months, Page Six is told.

A fashion source said: “Kim was offered at least three vintage gowns. They’re working hard in the atelier to fit her curves. While she is tiny in every single other area, they’re being careful as they don’t want a repeat of the Marilyn Monroe dress.” (Kardashian reportedly tore the gown at last year’s Met even after losing 16 pounds to fit into it.)

Her mother, Chanel superfan Kris Jenner, will also be there, alongside her sisters, model Kendall Jenner and make-up tycoon Kylie Jenner.

Lagerfeld once left Kim — then pregnant with daughter North West — in hysterical tears following their first photo shoot together for Harper’s Bazaar. Lagerfeld was known for giving the women he photographed Chanel bags, but Lagerfeld instead gave a hugely expensive Chanel Lego bag to Kris, who had arrived dressed in vintage Chanel.

“I was very hormonal and emotional from my pregnancy, so I went to the bathroom to cry and then called my cousin Cici to calm me down.” Kim said. “I was upset that my mom stole my moment! More importantly, I really wanted to one day give North that bag as a token from my only pregnancy shoot.”

The legendarily caustic designer then chastised the star for flaunting her jewelry after she was robbed at gunpoint of millions of dollars worth of diamonds in Paris.

“You cannot display your wealth and then be surprised that some people want to share it with you,” he said. “If you’re that famous and you put all your jewelry on the [internet], you go to hotels where nobody can come near to the room.”

Paris Hilton, a close Kardashian pal, has been invited to the Met Gala for the very first time, Page Six can confirm, while Hayley Bieber, Zoe Kravitz, Uma Thurman, and Suki Waterhouse and boyfriend Rob Pattinson are also expected.

The choice of Lagerfeld as this year’s theme is not without problems. He once called singer Adele “a little too fat.” Of the Princess of Wales’s sister, Pippa Middleton, he said, “I don’t like the sister’s face. She should only show her back.”

And when the dam broke on the #MeToo movement, Lagerfeld said: “If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model!”

“Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent,” he told Numero magazine in 2018 after three models accused Interview creative director Karl Templer of sexual harassment.

“I’m fed up with it,” Lagerfeld added. “What shocks me most in all of this are the starlets who have taken 20 years to remember what happened.”

Wintour, 73, this week told the New York Times, however: “Our friendship meant everything to me, and I miss him deeply. I am grateful for all the moments, such as [the Met Gala and its associated Lagerfeld exhibit], that can bring his work to life and, in the process, keep him near.”

A source close to Lohan, 36, told Page Six that the actress had not been invited. “They talked all the time when she was living overseas, Karl gave her advice. He just took a liking to her and she wore a lot of Chanel,” the source said, adding that Lohan is heavily pregnant and might not have gone anyway.

Jill Kargman, whose father, Arie Kopelman, is the former president of Chanel, told Page Six that she will be re-wearing her Chanel wedding gown, designed by Lagerfeld, on Monday night.

The gown actually arrived in a Chanel “coffin”-style box ahead of her wedding to Harry Kargman 21 years ago, the writer revealed, as she reminisced about Lagerfeld and his “legendary quips.”

Kargman, 48, said: “I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side, but he was someone who was so creative and artistic, you couldn’t help but be enthralled by him.

“My dad has so many fond memories of Karl. Once, there was this difficult woman at work and they were wondering what to do with her. Finally, Karl told my dad, ‘There’s good news and bad news, the good news is they gave her a very nice title, ‘Vice Chairman, Special Projects’, the bad news is there are no special projects.’”

Kargman added that Lagerfeld had his ear to the ground on trends until the end of his life: “He was ahead of everything.”

And Kargman raised the question of Monday’s big mystery guest: Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, who has indeed been invited.

“The only thing everyone is talking about is Choupette and whether she’s coming,” Kargman said. “That’s the only thing people care about. This cat is sitting on a litter box of solid gold!”

“She got the invitation,” Lucas Berullier, Choupette’s agent and owner of My Pet Agency, which specializes in pet influencers, said Friday.

“It’s an event in honor of the legacy of Karl, and Choupette is obviously a central part of the legacy,” Berullier added.

However, if Choupette does attend, guests will be asked not to pet her as she is famously grumpy, the fashion source told Page Six.

Following Lagerfeld’s death at age 85 in February 2019, following a secret battle with pancreatic cancer, it was reported there were seven beneficiaries to Lagerfeld’s estate.

They are his muse, Baptiste Giabiconi; bodyguard Sebastien Jondeau; model and friend Jake Davis; Brad Kroenig, a model turned Florida realtor and his son Hudson, who was Lagerfeld’s godson; Caroline Lebar, Lagerfeld’s longtime publicist; and Caçote, Choupette’s caretaker.

But Lucien Frydlender, Lagerfeld’s main accountant for more than three decades, has relocated to Switzerland and is believed to be suffering from ill health, thus leaving the presumed heirs in the dark.

This week, the BBC documentary “The Mysterious Mr. Lagerfeld” tried to figure out who will inherit the estate as the designer’s lawyer  Céline Degoulet — who knows the names of the beneficiaries — explained: “The situation left at the end was not very tidy. This kind of big succession can take 10 years.

Not to mention the fact that the designer’s assets are split between France and Monaco — meaning that the cost of processing the fortune will be enormous.

The doc also revealed that Jondeau was the only one who knew about Lagerfeld’s final illness, which started in June 2015, and all drugs were prescribed in Jondeau’s name to keep the news quiet.

Gilles Defour, a former colleague of Lagerfeld at Chanel, meanwhile, recalled introducing the designer to Jacques de Bascher, who Lagerfeld admitted was the love of his life. But the two men got into a bitter love triangle with fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who also loved de Bascher.

“Karl and Jacques was absolutely the perfect love story and the perfect impossible story. Karl has a problem with sex. He can’t have sex. And Jacques was crazy about sex. That’s why he let Jacques, um, go everywhere,” Patrick Hourcade says in the documentary. An artist and close friend of the designer, Hourcade kept Lagerfeld’s mother’s ashes for two years in his bedroom.

Giabiconi in the documentary describes his relationship with Lagerfeld more like father and son. He adds that “At one point, we had expressed a desire to one day maybe for Karl to adopt me. That’s what he wanted. He gave me a present, a set of luggage from Louis Vuitton. He ordered initials on the luggage. So he put BLG, Baptiste Lagerfeld Giabiconi.”

Lagerfeld’s Connecticut-based niece, Caroline Johnson — who describes herself as “a fat American” — recalls in the documentary how Lagerfeld offered to make her a wedding gown.

“The dress did not come until the day before the wedding. He put it on the Concorde. It had its own seat and it was delivered by a driver to my house in the middle of a snowstorm,” she recalled.

Whether with family, friends, or colleagues, to the end, Lagerfeld remained his defiant self.

“Fashion is about elimination,” he once told The Telegraph. “I’m good at cutting people off. I can wait 10 years and then pull the chair. Sometimes people don’t even know that it was me who pulled the chair. Some are not even worth the effort. Others are so mediocre that life takes care of them anyway.”