Sotheby’s publishes Karl Lagerfeld’s estate
Das auction house Sotheby’s auctioned personal items belonging to fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld in Cologne on Wednesday. The evening auction generated total proceeds of 631,764 euros. That far exceeded estimates, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman said. A total of 233 lots are to be offered up to and including Thursday, and a further 250 lots will be auctioned online. The preliminary estimated value for all lots was around 700,000 euros, but this sum was quickly achieved in the evening auction on Wednesday.
Two tranches of the Lagerfeld estate had already been auctioned off in Monaco and Paris last year. Together they had paid 18.2 million euros, four times the preliminary estimate.
Wednesday evening’s auction was the first live auction at Sotheby’s new German headquarters. Since last year, the company has been based in Palais Oppenheim, a castle-like property on the Rhine. According to Sotheby’s, it is the only international auction house to hold auctions in Germany. In Europe, Cologne is the sixth auction location for Sotheby’s, the others are London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich and Milan.