It is a year since Karl Lagerfeld passed away, leaving behind a legacy for his friends and colleagues at Chanel, Fendi and his own KL brand to remember him by.

When we spoke extensively in Paris, the year before he died, I did not know these would be our last meetings. “I have the fashion industry, I have photography books and publishing—that’s enough! I like to watch the world, but I don’t want to be watched,” he explained to me.

Describing his private and personal world at home, where he was surrounded by what he calculated as 100,000 books, he said: “I love the physical presence of books, and I can hardly call it a bedroom because I pulled down every wall. It’s like a huge box of frosted glass—no doors, just a huge studio where I sketch, read and Choupette lives,” he told me. The white cat with sapphire eyes now leads a comfortable life with one of Lagerfeld’s maids.

Lagerfeld was always fiercely independent, a true individual. “I’m not French and I never intended to become French, because I like to be a stranger,” he told me. “I’m a stranger in Germany. I never wanted to be part of something I couldn’t get away from. I love to be an outsider. In fact, I’m part of nothing. I’m totally free in the best sense of the word.”

He talked occasionally about his parents, saying: “My father was a very nice person, very sweet, but he wasn’t as funny as my mother. So, sometimes I felt guilty that I was not as nice to him, as I was a slave to her.”

Hearing Lagerfeld speak about his life and listening to those who worked with him, the story is of a love affair with creative fashion.

I have many memories of Lagerfeld—the time we went to a Parisian evening ‘do’, with him waving fans in front of his face; after a private dinner in New York, when he danced with Oscar de la Renta; or once, in Paris, at a Chanel event in rue Cambon, when he suddenly swept me off my feet to waltz around the room.

So, how are his friends and colleagues remembering the late Karl Lagerfeld a year after his death? Here, we share memories, in celebration of his life.

Amanda Harlech

Amanda Harlech is a British creative, writer and long-time muse of Lagerfeld. She continues to be a creative consultant at Chanel, now helmed by Virginie Viard who was Lagerfeld’s right hand for three decades.

“I talk to Karl every day, just like I used to,” Harlech told me. “Mostly, he would laugh at my slowness to get down to ‘it’—writing, painting, sorting out the piles of books, restoring the Jacobean garden at my home.”

“Playing the piano opens cascades of memories,” she continued. “This is when he is really close to me. He always wanted to play. And those moments when I was practicing some Bach or Brahms and he was working in another room seem to be actual, happening again in real time.”

“He gave me a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting. He loved the story and the slim, green volume. But we both loved following her slanting, spiky signature with our finger. Again it was like we defeated linear time and discovered a perpetual, reverberating present.”

I once asked Lagerfeld why he never attended the exhibition of his work, Karl Lagerfeld: Modemethode, that Harlech put together at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, in 2015—a typical reaction from the designer, who had a radical attitude about dragging out the past.

“I have no archive,” Lagerfeld declared. “I never go to the Chanel or the Fendi archives. No! No! No! No! No! The archives I need are in my mind.”

But what about the young, fresh designers taking over storied fashion houses? Should they also be encouraged to disregard a company’s past—or to study it?

“One should not over-act emotions,” said Lagerfeld, who was 85 when we last met. “I hated being a child. I wanted to be grown-up.”

Bruno Pavlovsky

Bruno Pavlovsky is the president of fashion at Chanel overlooking both haute couture and ready-to-wear. He chose Virginie Viard to take over from Karl Lagerfeld, after working with her for 30 years, believing that she has both the experience and the imagination to succeed.

“Karl’s memory will live forever in our hearts and minds,” the executive said. “He left us an amazing energy. We can feel it today in the studio, in the workshops on rue Cambon: the wish to do the right thing.”

“Special things happen when you work with someone for more than 30 years. He was never just a business partner. We connected well and I personally learned a lot from him, his vision and his capability of aiming for the best while inventing the future.”

“We showcase ten collections every year with ten different stories. We always start from scratch, all over again. Each Chanel collection should inspire and bring newness into the house. That’s what Karl Lagerfeld was very good at. So is Virginie Viard today. We never rest on the success of the past.”

Silvia Venturini Fendi

No-one understood Lagerfeld’s needs more than the Fendi family. He joined them early in his career, in 1967. And however much he might have been attached to the house of Chanel, this Italian connection was longstanding, lasting until his death.

Creative director of the brand, Silvia Venturini Fendi, who worked so closely with Karl during his visits to Rome, described Fendi’s bond with Lagerfeld: “We can say that with Fendi, there was a special bond [between Karl Lagerfeld and] my family, but also a great attachment to the maison itself. It has been the longest relationship in the history of fashion. A love story of 55 years.”