Sotheby’s has announced the sixth sale from the estate of Karl Lagerfeld, offering over 1,000 previously unseen personal sketches from the late designer’s private archive. The auction, which will be on view in Paris from July 2 to July 8, 2026, before going under the hammer, represents the largest single cache of Lagerfeld’s drawings to reach the market — a trove that spans his early years at Chloé, his groundbreaking work at Chanel, his tenure at Fendi, and his private sketchbooks filled with architectural studies, portraits, and fashion fantasies never intended for production.
For collectors, the sketches represent a rare opportunity to own a piece of fashion history at the level of process rather than product. A Lagerfeld sketch is not a finished garment; it is the moment before the garment, the instant when a line on paper becomes the seed of a silhouette that will eventually circle the globe. The auction will be held at Sotheby’s Paris, with bidding available online and by telephone, and estimates are expected to range from a few hundred to several thousand euros per lot.
The sale continues Sotheby’s successful strategy of unbundling Lagerfeld’s estate across multiple auctions, each focusing on a different aspect of his life and work. Previous sales have covered his furniture, his art collection, his books, and his personal wardrobe. The cumulative effect of these auctions has been to construct a posthumous biography of Lagerfeld through objects — a material portrait of a designer whose public persona was carefully curated but whose private life, these sales reveal, was equally rich and idiosyncratic.
The collection offers an unprecedented window into Lagerfeld’s creative process. Unlike the polished presentation sketches he submitted to clients and editors, these drawings are immediate, gestural, often annotated in his distinctive mix of German, French, and English. They show a designer thinking on paper: working out the relationship between a sleeve and a bodice, testing the fall of a skirt, circling a detail five times until the line is right. The auction includes sketches from the 1970s through the 2010s, offering a visual chronology of Lagerfeld’s evolving hand.
