Sotheby’s Paris sells unseen Karl Lagerfeld drawings and personal treasures

Sotheby’s will open its sixth sale devoted to Karl Lagerfeld’s estate in Paris on July 2, putting more than 1,000 previously unseen drawings, working documents and personal objects into an online auction that runs through July 8. The public exhibition will close a day earlier, on July 7, making this the most concentrated look yet at the designer’s private archive.

For collectors choosing a gift with real emotional charge, the most compelling lots are not the headline fashion relics but the intimate material: hand-colored illustrations, political sketches, private working papers, fingerless gloves and about 200 iPods. Sotheby’s France vice president Pierre Mothes said the drawings were personal works Lagerfeld kept for himself, not pieces he handed to the brands he worked for. That detail matters. It makes the archive feel less like memorabilia and more like access to the creator’s inner world.

The sale is being offered entirely without reserve, with bidding starting at 1 euro, a structure that should sharpen attention well beyond the usual fashion crowd. Sotheby’s says the drawings and papers span decades, with material dating back to the 1970s; the French-language listing extends the archive’s range from the 1960s to 2019. The auction also includes the kind of objects that tell you how Lagerfeld lived, not just how he dressed: gadgets, personal belongings and the fingerless gloves that became part of his public image.

Sotheby’s is framing the auction as the final chapter in the dispersal of Lagerfeld’s personal collection, following earlier estate sales in Paris, Monaco and Cologne. The market has already shown it will pay for this kind of provenance. Previous Lagerfeld estate sales brought in more than 18.2 million euros, with about 1,500 bidders from more than 60 countries participating. A drawing titled Les Trois Muses sold for 201,600 euros in 1986 against an estimate of 1,000 to 1,500 euros, while a set of four fashion sketchbooks brought 315,000 euros in 2021, far above a 500 to 800 euro estimate.

Lagerfeld died in 2019 at 85, and this sale extends the appetite for his archive from couture into the more personal terrain of sketches, notes and possessions. For buyers looking to give something that feels rarer than a logo and more meaningful than a big-ticket trophy, these are the lots that carry the strongest collector appeal.