Karl Lagerfeld is known for giving controversial comments in interviews. In the last year alone he has called Adele 'fat', Russian men 'ugly' and doubted whether Emannuelle Alt is cut out for the editor's job at Vogue Paris. In a press conference in Tokyo this week, his attention turned to Newsweek.
Last month Robin Givhan wrote an article for Newsweek/The Daily Beast where she questioned whether the designer is 'spread too thin' and called him 'overrated'. Lagerfeld responded by questioning who Givhan is saying that he had never heard of her but the issue came up again in the press conference where he was asked about Tina Brown and the newspaper generally. “First of all, Tina Brown’s magazine is not doing well at all…She is dying,” WWD reports Lagerfeld as having said. “I’m sorry for Tina Brown, who was such a success at ‘Vanity Fair,’ to go down with a shitty little paper like this. I’m sorry.”
UPDATE: Fashionista reached out to Newsweek this morning to find out what they had to say about Lagerfeld's comments and this is whaty they had to say:
In the past year since Tina Brown took over as editor in chief of Newsweek, newsstand sales have increased 30% year on year, advertising pages have seen a 27% increase for the first quarter of 2012, we have over 2.2 million people engaged in our social media communities and perhaps the most telling indicator of the renewed vitality of Newsweek, subscription renewals, in a consistent state of decline since 2005, rose by 3% last year.
