The “most anticipated guest” for this year’s Met Gala in New York is the late Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, says The Wall Street Journal.
And some are hoping to see Choupette Lagerfeld – an 11-year-old Birman with enormous blue eyes and silky cream-coloured fur – strutting down the red carpet at 6pm US eastern time on Monday (6am Singapore time on Tuesday) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Lagerfeld’s honour.
The theme for this year’s fundraising gala – Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty – pays tribute to the late German fashion designer’s styles and themes. He died in 2019 at the age of 85.
Ms Francoise Cacote, Choupette’s caretaker, told the WSJ: “She was his baby. He would say, ‘In my life, my priority is Choupette, and then everything else.’”
Ms Cacote, 50, has been Choupette’s nanny since 2012 and she inherited the cat permanently after her boss passed away.
Lagerfeld once told French Numero magazine that Choupette was “peaceful, funny, fun, graceful”.
The former Chanel creative director said: “She’s pretty to look at, and she has a great gait – but her main quality is that she doesn’t speak. It was love at first sight.”
Another time, he joked to CNN that if he could marry his cat, he would.
Living a lavish life under Lagerfeld, Choupette was provided with an agent and two maids. She also has her own coffee-table books, a skincare collaboration, 158,000 followers on Instagram, over 45,000 on Twitter, and appears on the cover of Vogue magazine’s May edition with Naomi Campbell.
According to Le Figaro, Lagerfeld even included Choupette in his will, and she reportedly inherited part of his vast US$195 million (S$260 million) fortune, though how much of it has yet to be confirmed.
According to a biography of Lagerfeld, Choupette originally belonged to French male model Baptiste Giabiconi – one of Lagerfeld’s main muses. The late designer agreed to cat-sit Choupette for two weeks, during which he became devoted to the cat and decided to keep her.
Citing confidentiality agreements, Mr Lucas Berullier, Choupette’s agent, told WSJ the cat received an invitation to the event. He maintained “a lot of people want her there” but would not say whether Choupette would be attending.
Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian dropped a teaser about Choupette’s attendance in an Instagram post, showing the two lying in bed. “Had a date with Choupette in Paris,” wrote Kardashian. “We then spent some time at Karl Lagerfeld’s office to get a little inspiration for the Met.”
