Karl Lagerfeld doesn’t like to talk about the past. He refuses to discuss his 50-year career with Fendi, for whom he was made creative director, in charge of fur and women’s ready-to-wear, in 1965. Neither will he dwell on his 32-year stewardship ofChanel, where he has been the chief designer since 1983. He hasn’t even been to visit his vast “futurespective” in Bonn, Germany, the most complete exhibition of his oeuvre ever mounted, featuring everything from a reproduction of the coat for which he was awarded the Woolmark prize for design in 1954, to his first collections for Chloé (for whom he worked between 1964 and 1996), and from a regiment of mannequins dressed in Chanel tweeds, through Fendi furs to pieces from his own eponymous line.

Absolutely not! For Lagerfeld, nostalgia is a creative poison. “I’m very much against it,” he says from his studio in Paris. “I’m always into the next step. I’m interested in what’s going on, not what has happened. I never look at the archives. I hate archives!”

If Lagerfeld sounds impatient, he is. His career has been built on a light-speed forward momentum. It’s the same urgent energy that has enabled him to juggle the demands of three entirely separate and visually distinct houses at the same time (Fendi, Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld) and maintain alternative occupations as a photographer, occasional writer and keeper of Choupette, a snow white cat he was given in 2011 and who now commands an Instagram following of 64,000 followers. Even his unique German accent sounds impatient; like a man exasperated by a sentence’s formulation in his mouth.