Happy Birthday Karl Lagerfeld

Happy birthday, Karl! No one knows how old you are. At least we can reasonably assume you’re not 100, because you once said, “Having adult children makes you look 100 years old. I don’t want that.” You don’t have any adult children, but you do have 22 assistants (which makes it possible to design umpteenth collections a year for Chanel, Fendi, and the Karl Lagerfeld label and now your new fashion newspaper The Daily Karl), a dozens of iPods, and nannies to attend to them, as well as an endless supply of diet Coke. I mean. What do you get a man who has literally everything?

We thought of baking you a cake. But we were concerned about when we should deliver the cake, because, dear Karl, are you still not permitting yourself to eat between the hours of 8 AM and 8 PM, the hours when humans are most likely to be metabolizing calories? But, of all the people, we know you could resist. After all, you walk about every day in a shirt with a four-inch-tall collar, and you once lost 92 pounds in order to fit into a suit. That is a will made of iron—except for you, it is made of a state of mind. “I only like what I’m supposed to like. I’m beyond temptation … I’m like the animals in the forest. They don’t touch what they cannot eat,” you once said. Perhaps we should give up. Or perhaps we should just pick up a little something for your dear pet Choupette—the chicest chat in world, if we were to judge by her Twitter, Instagram, Shu Uemura line, and new book, Choupette: The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat.

Then again, perhaps it is preferable not to try at all, because it would seem a fool’s errand to presume we could ever please the man who says, “When I was four I asked my mother for a valet for my birthday.” Happy birthday, Karl! Long live the Kaiser.