While Lagerfeld’s palatial Parisian town house – one of many homes, including at least three in Paris, one in Rome, a villa in Monte Carlo, and boltholes in New York and Vermont – was opposite the Louvre, sources reveal that Choupette now resides in the Paris suburbs. Gone too is Choupette’s pampered life of peace and serenity. Now, her housemates are Caçote’s teenage children and her rescue cat, described as “young, frisky and a bit common” by a source – the cat, not the kids. Caçote says she has taken on part-time work to help keep Choupette in some style, but mahogany-table mealtimes are unlikely to be accommodated amid the rough and tumble of teen life with a moggy.
Of course, Choupette cannot speak for herself – Lagerfeld once gushed that one of her many attributes, to his mind, was her silence. But her owner also pronounced her dislike of children, as well as other animals, making the stark facts of this new existence a probable endurance test for the Garboesque loner.
Choupette first arrived in Lagerfeld’s life in 2011 as a four-month-old kitten, when Giabiconi asked him to catsit. The designer fell in love and simply refused to give her back. It’s said he even turned his white apartment black so no one would ever sit on her.
From then on, Lagerfeld’s devotion was unerring. Choupette’s first public image caught her standing next to a full bubble bath under a vase of roses. By 2013, the two of them had featured on a Harper’s Bazaar cover. He was even cremated with a piece of aquamarine jewellery in the animal’s likeness.
Thankfully, Choupette is still singing for her supper, and her lucrative career continues, despite her advancing years. She has an agent, Lucas Bérullier, and a recent marketing campaign – thought to have earned her the equivalent of around £100,000 – was for her own range of cat items with Maisons du Monde, the French furniture multinational.
There have been premium jobs for Choupette post-Lagerfeld – a photo shoot with Naomi Campbell for Vogue with Annie Leibovitz, as well as a starring role alongside Kim Kardashian promoting the 2023 Lagerfeld-themed Met Ball. Reportedly, the ladies didn’t get on. When Kardashian tried to hold her, Choupette lashed out towards her face.
However, other jobs have become a little less starry. “Let’s be honest, we can’t ask [for] millions for a post or a shoot,” Bérullier told The Atlantic, confessing that people were originally paying for Lagerfeld’s name and input.