Choupette, Karl Lagerfeld's beloved cat, was not included in his will despite speculation. Photo / Getty Images
“Who wants nine lives when you’re first guaranteed the very finest?” the blue-cream Birman with sapphire eyes might purr.
Choupette (a true star needs no surname, after all) is, of course, the beloved former pet of the late German fashion legend, Karl Lagerfeld. She became a household name in her own right during the designer’s lifetime, thanks to his public expressions of adoration.
“She is the centre of the world,” he said. “If you saw her, you would understand. She is kind of Greta Garbo.” He also remarked, perhaps a little too wistfully: “There is no marriage, yet, for human beings and animals.” At which point Choupette may have stifled a meow, and inwardly thanked her lucky stars in more ways than one.
With two books in her name, a modelling career and social media accounts boasting hundreds of thousands of followers, her time by Lagerfeld’s side was opulent. The pair shared a bed: “We are like an old couple... we sleep on the same pillow”.
Since the 85-year-old’s death from cancer in 2019, however, Choupette has had a second – simpler – life with the late designer’s French housekeeper, Francoise Cacote.
Choupette and Cacote were thought to have been named in Lagerfeld’s will (an animal cannot inherit directly under French law), but another twist in the tale is emerging. After a seven-year investigation by authorities, including French tax officials, into Lagerfeld’s estimated £200m-plus ($460m-plus) fortune and formal will, the reported benefactors do not include Choupette or Cacote.
It had been widely speculated that Lagerfeld, who had no children, had gifted Cacote her home and £1m to keep Choupette living in the manner to which she had become accustomed, but it seems there was no cash in the coffers. Speaking to the Atlantic last week, Cacote said that neither she nor Choupette have received any money from Lagerfeld’s estate. “I want to be completely transparent – today, we have received absolutely nothing,” she said, adding she has hired lawyers to make a “claim”.
While French inheritance documents are not public, the Daily Mail reports Lagerfeld’s beneficiaries are a range of his muses: his bodyguard and chauffeur, Sebastien Jondeau, 51; Brad Kroenig, a 47-year-old American male model; and Baptiste Giabiconi, 36, a French model whom Lagerfeld viewed as a son. Ironically, Giabiconi was Choupette’s original owner.
Perhaps, at the grand age of 15, which equates to nearly 76 in human years, Choupette must resign herself to an ongoing simpler life?
While Lagerfeld’s palatial Parisian town house – one of many homes, including at least three in Paris, one in Rome, a villa in Monte Carlo, and boltholes in New York and Vermont – was opposite the Louvre, sources reveal that Choupette now resides in the Paris suburbs. Gone too is Choupette’s pampered life of peace and serenity. Now, her housemates are Cacote’s teenage children and her rescue cat, described as “young, frisky and a bit common” by a source – the cat, not the kids. Cacote says she has taken on part-time work to help keep Choupette in some style, but mahogany-table mealtimes are unlikely to be accommodated amid the rough and tumble of teen life with a moggy.
Of course, Choupette cannot speak for herself – Lagerfeld once gushed that one of her many attributes, to his mind, was her silence. But her owner also pronounced her dislike of children, as well as other animals, making the stark facts of this new existence a probable endurance test for the Garboesque loner.
Choupette arrived in Lagerfeld’s life in 2011 as a four-month-old kitten, when Giabiconi asked him to catsit. The designer fell in love and simply refused to give her back. It’s said he even turned his white apartment black so no one would ever sit on her.
From then on, Lagerfeld’s devotion was unswerving. Choupette’s first public image caught her standing next to a full bubble bath under a vase of roses. By 2013, the two of them had featured on a Harper’s Bazaar cover. Lagerfeld was even cremated with a piece of aquamarine jewellery in the animal’s likeness.
Thankfully, Choupette is still singing for her supper, and her lucrative career continues, despite her advancing years. She has an agent, Lucas Berullier, and a recent marketing campaign – thought to have earned her the equivalent of around £100,000 – was for her own range of cat items with Maisons du Monde, the French furniture multinational.
There have been premium jobs for Choupette post-Lagerfeld – a photo shoot with Naomi Campbell for Vogue with Annie Leibovitz, as well as a starring role alongside Kim Kardashian promoting the 2023 Lagerfeld-themed Met Ball. Reportedly, the ladies didn’t get on. When Kardashian tried to hold her, Choupette lashed out towards her face.
However, other jobs have become a little less starry. “Let’s be honest, we can’t ask [for] millions for a post or a shoot,” Berullier told the Atlantic, confessing that people were originally paying for Lagerfeld’s name and input.
It’s far from a dog’s life, most would agree. Any benefactors of Lagerfeld’s fortune stand to lose 60 per cent of it as non-spouses or civil partners under the French system, but any reported gift Choupette received before her owner’s death would have avoided that.
Cats generally land on their paws, and this case is no different. The former housekeeper has made her devotion clear. “Choupette wants for nothing, that’s my top priority,” she told the Atlantic. One gets the feeling that’s exactly the way Lagerfeld would have liked it to be.
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