📍Bad Bramstedt, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
1934 – 1952“I was born in Hamburg, but the countryside I remember is Bissenmoor, the estate near Bad Bramstedt where my family lived in the manor house in the 1930s. My father, Otto, had made his fortune in condensed milk, and my mother, Elisabeth, was sharp-tongued, elegant and impatient with anything dull. Around the house were small farms, flat fields and big northern skies. I was not a country boy at heart; I was the child with a sketchbook, already more interested in clothes, pictures and books than in games. When Hamburg was devastated by bombing in the war, we went back to Bad Bramstedt, and for several years I attended the town's school. Classmates later remembered that I was always better dressed than everyone else and always drawing, whatever was happening in the lesson. They teased me with a nickname taken from my father's milk brand. I learned early that being different could be a kind of armour, and that a strong personal style could keep the world at a manageable distance. In 1949 we moved back to Hamburg, and in 1953 my mother and I left for Paris. A year later I won a design competition, and from then on fashion was my world, at Balmain, Chloé, Fendi and, for decades, Chanel. I reinvented myself many times and was famously unsentimental about the past. Still, the boy at Bissenmoor, sketching in a manor house in the middle of the fields and dreaming of somewhere more elegant, was the beginning of all of it.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today