Jacques de Bascher

Jacques de Bascher first met Karl Lagerfeld at the Nuage at the age of twenty-one. A few months later, after Jacques de Bascher resigned from Air France, they went to live together until 1989. Lagerfeld claimed their relationship was platonic and non-physical. Lagerfeld told French journalist Marie Ottavi:

Jacques de Bascher discovered that he was HIV positive in 1984. At the end of his life, he cut himself off almost from everyone, unable to bear the physical decline. He died of AIDS at Raymond Poincaré University Hospital in 1989, watched over by Karl Lagerfeld, who had an extra bed installed at his bedside. The following year Karl Lagerfeld bought a house near Hamburg, which he named Villa Jako in Jacques de Bascher's memory. In 1998, Lagerfeld launched a fragrance called Jako. The intimate, family-only funeral mass took place in the chapel of the Père-Lachaise cemetery; a second mass was celebrated in the chapel of Mée-sur-Seine, where Karl Lagerfeld owned property, in the presence of Jacques de Bascher's mother and friends, including his former fiancée, Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon.

In 1973, Yves Saint Laurent, at the time still companion of Pierre Bergé, fell in love with Jacques de Bascher. While Lagerfeld pretended he didn't notice, Yves Saint Laurent and Jacques de Bascher had an unbalanced and destructive relationship. Bergé threatened Bascher, who put an end to this affair.

When he returned to Paris, he attended the Panthéon-Assas University for a few months and became a steward for Air France in 1972, but it was high society clubs that attracted him. According to Gilles Martin-Chauffier, for fifteen years, Jacques de Bascher "has evolved like a snake in the grass" between the gardens of the Tuileries, the five-stars, the Parisian backrooms, The Palace, the rue Sainte-Anne, (The Seven), The Blue Hand in Montreuil, the castle of his family and the big festivals of the fashion world.

Jacques de Bascher was the member of de Bascher family, the son of Antony de Bascher, governor of the province of Cholon in Vietnam and an executive of Shell's insurance department on his return to France in 1955. de Buscher's mother, née Armelle Petit, is descended from a line of landowners in Limousin. Jacques de Bascher has two brothers and two sisters. He spent his childhood in a bourgeois Catholic family, between an apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine on boulevard Commandant-Charcot, which overlooks the Bois de Boulogne and the castle Berrière near Nantes. He studied at the small high school Pasteur, then high school Janson de Sailly, and finally high school Charlemagne. He seduced one of his high school teachers, realising his beauty and physical demeanor.

Jacques de Bascher or Jacques "Bascher de Beaumarchais", born July 8, 1951 in Saigon (French Indochina) and died September 3, 1989 at Garches Hospital, was a Parisian dandy, member of the French Jet set and Karl Lagerfeld's companion from 1971 until his death, as well as Yves Saint Laurent's lover in 1973.