Pier Righi0:00
Well, allow me a bit of a comparison into fashion. Actually, if you see these beautiful creations at the runway, you very often praise the designer, as Karl was always praised. But Karl would have been the first to say, 'Oh, the praise is actually not to me only.' There are very important people behind the scenes that make it possible to basically translate my vision, my designs, into reality with beautiful craftsmanship. And that's the seamstresses, the people that really sew the product. When it comes to haute couture, it is actually the same in an architectural project. You have the vision, you've got the idea, you've got the inspiration, but you need to have people that have the talent and the knowledge to translate your vision into reality and can basically apply this craftsmanship. And that is what we have found with Traaf. When we met for the very first time, it became very clear and obvious that they understood where we were coming from, what our vision was, and that they had very clearly the capabilities to translate that with their craftsmanship into reality. So that's the perfect match. It's like in fashion: it needs the designer, it needs the seamstress to bring a beautiful garment to the catwalk, and that is what we're doing here together with Traaf.
As you know, Karl was not only about fashion. He was, yes, a fashion icon, but his areas of interest were so much broader. It was about photography, music, literature, places to go, people, architecture. And he brought it very effortlessly together and wove it into a canvas and amplified it to a bigger picture. And that is pretty much also the starting point, the inspiration of what we're trying to do here: bringing different areas of interest together and applying it to a bigger canvas to make it a beautiful frame for people to fill it with their lives, with their experiences, with their points of interest. That is the idea behind it. Very concretely, we took the inspiration of our Parisian 18th-century Haussmannian house in the center of Paris that Karl was always fascinated by and loved, and basically took the structure of that architecture, the various flows of the light, the staircase, the geometry of it, and translated it into the future through this very contemporary development that we're creating right now. So these were the two major areas, touching all the interest points of Karl at the same time, concretely going with an architectural idea that he was inspired by.
So, Karl Lagerfeld, as a maison, we have been a founding member of the Fashion Pact already in 2019. So sustainability is engraved, if you want, in our DNA and everything we do, and that also, of course, goes into our architectural project. We have and are having all these conversations and considerations with the Traaf team. As an example, the creek where this development is built on is very sustainably developed in the sense of consuming much less water — it's pretty self-sustained water-wise than others, only this being one example. So sustainability is, of course, an important element when we look into these type of projects such as this one. Of course, always when we do this type of development in general, it's important that they do not live alive in isolation but form part of a bigger community. It starts with how a development is ideated — it should always be very respectful of the surrounding that is found and also the nature that is found, and that also applies to people living there. How this then concretely will translate has to be seen, but of course it should not be a secluded element. It should nicely embrace the community and be embraced by it.
