ONE RICH CAT, SORTA

THE SUBHEAD TO CHRIS HEATH’S PIECE “The Richest Cat in the World,” The Atlantic, May 18, 2026, is “Did Karl Lagerfeld really leave millions to his blue-cream Birman, Choupette?”

Here are gleanings of a cat adventure far more complex than my own pal ∏wacket’s.

My pal ∏wacket at work. 

Background. Chris Heath recounts, “Karl Lagerfeld, the great German fashion designer, lived in a surreal kind of grandeur. The creative director of both Chanel and Fendi, he owned apartments in Paris, Rome, and the Côte d’Azur, as well as villas in Biarritz and his native Hamburg; enormous collections of Art Deco furniture, antique jewelry, and couture garments; a personal library of some 300,000 books, by his own estimation; paintings and sculptures by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and John Baldessari; three Rolls-Royces; a curious assemblage of 509 iPods; and hundreds of pairs of his trademark wraparound sunglasses and fingerless biker gloves.” 

And Choupette.

Karl Lagerfeld and his pal Choupette. This and the following images courtesy of Lucas Bérullier via The Atlantic.  

Lagerfeld and his Pal. “In the years before he died,” Heath cites, “Lagerfeld often spoke in extraordinary ways about the role Choupette played in his life. Listen to just a fraction of his avowals: ‘I never thought that I could fall in love with an animal like this.’ ‘She is the center of the world. If you saw her, you would understand. She is kind of Greta Garbo.’ ”

Hmm… My pal ∏wacket? Kinda Groucho Marx.

Heath descrbes, “Choupette came into Lagerfeld’s life over the 2011 Christmas holiday. A young model with whom Lagerfeld had a close friendship, Baptiste Giabiconi, asked whether he might leave his four-month-old kitten at Lagerfeld’s home while he visited family in Marseille. Somewhat reluctantly, Lagerfeld, who had previously had little time or affection for cats, agreed and found himself besotted. When the kitten was reclaimed by Giabiconi, Lagerfeld moped, and beseeched that Choupette be returned to him for good, a wish soon granted.”

Choupette’s Career. Heath relates, “Lagerfeld proclaimed her the most famous cat in the world, and declared that her advertising work had made her independently wealthy. ‘She has her own fortune from things she did,’ he stated. ‘She’s a rich girl!’ ”

“According to Lagerfeld,” Heath continues, “in 2014 alone, Choupette earned more than $3 million from campaigns for Opel Corsa cars and Shu Uemura’s Shupette makeup line. That same year came a book, Choupette: The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat, including photos, biographical tidbits, and details of Choupette’s beauty regimen. A second book, Choupette by Karl Lagerfeld, 53 photos of Choupette taken by the designer on his iPhone, followed in 2018.” 

Reality Intervened: Heath relates, “Lagerfeld had learned he had cancer several years before his death in a Paris hospital on February 19, 2019, but this was information he had shared with almost no one. To ensure that Choupette was properly taken care of after he was gone, he designated his housemaid Françoise Caçote, who had long been the cat’s primary lady-in-waiting (and diarist), as her ongoing caretaker.”

Lagerfeld’s former housekeeper Françoise Caçote and Choupette. 

The Rumors Followed: In the British press, what Heath describes as “even its supposedly more respectable sectors….‘A cat belonging to the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died on Tuesday, is reportedly in line to receive up to $300m (£230m) of his estate’ (The Telegraph); ‘Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, may be set to inherit some of his £150 million fortune’ (the Daily Express); ‘Karl Lagerfeld’s cat Choupette is reportedly set to inherit some of the formidable fashion designer’s £150m fortune’ (the Independent).”

In time, an Agent. Lucas Bérullier is Choupette’s agent. Heath describes, “Bérullier runs a company called My Pet Agency, one he started nearly a decade ago after seeing an unfilled opportunity for representing pets with potent social-media engagement. My Pet Agency’s menagerie is dominated by dogs, which Bérullier says are generally more obliging than cats.” 

Heath recounts, “Bérullier’s wife, a makeup artist, was doing a job in Lagerfeld’s studio, and she got to talking with Lagerfeld’s former bodyguard and confidant Sébastien Jondeau about Choupette. Bérullier soon went to visit Françoise Caçote and Choupette, and everything was agreed. ‘She [Caçote] needed someone to help harmonizing and structuring the communication,’ he says. ‘Someone on her side defending what was best for her and what was best for Choupette.”

I concur with Bérullier’s view, though I confess I never recognized ∏whacket to be in need of such defense.

A Choupette Gig. Heath describes, “Clients are told that there is a two-hour maximum, that everything must be ready before Choupette’s arrival, and that she requires her own private room. There must be no noise on set, and no one may take photographs aside from the photographer. Also, Choupette must not be shot from above. Shooting from human height, Bérullier explains, is the classic amateur pet-owner blunder.”

Also, Heath observes, “There are moral considerations, too. ‘We believe that Choupette only works with animal-cruelty-free brands,’ he explains. ‘A brand that uses fur, we would have to decline a collaboration.’ ”

I agree, and so does ∏wacket; though he also recalls shooting an elephant in his pajamas (“and how he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”)

Cat Doubles. “Whenever prudent,” Heath explains, “there will be a cat double on set, ready to do whatever Choupette might not. They don’t use just one regular stand-in—it depends on what might be required that day: ‘We know the one that is very human-friendly, the other one that is playful, the one that has the eyes that look the same or the tail that looks the same.’ ”

The German painter Max Renneisen depicted Choupette in the French 18th-century style (with a very 21st-century Lagerfield floating above her. Photograph by Joe Clark; painting courtesy of Max Renneisen via The Atlantic. 

Heath continues, “He [Bérullier] notes that the Choupette camp doesn’t go out of its way to disguise footage from a double, and that eagle-eyed Choupette fans can often tell.”

∏wacket says he can tell: Choupette is the one that’s “très jolie,” and then my pal wiggles his eyebrows. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026