Kim Kardashian West cannot be surprised that she was robbed at gunpoint after displaying her jewellery so prominently on the internet, leading fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld said.
Chanel’s Paris-based creative director said the 35-year-old TV reality star should not have stayed in a building with flimsy security after showering social media with images of a $4 million (Dh14.6 million) ring she had received from husband Kanye West. The ring, plus a box of other jewellery worth around $5 million, was stolen in the early hours of Monday morning by a gang of five masked men disguised as police officers from the Hotel du Pourtales, a 19th century town house where Kardashian West was based during Paris fashion week.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed the discreet hotel had no security camera in its internal courtyard. Police were also unable to obtain any surveillance video of the robbers’ faces as they went in and out of the building.
Despite being a regular bolthole for stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna, it had just one unarmed concierge who was forced at gunpoint to open Kardashian West’s door.
Lagerfeld, 83, said: “I don’t understand why she was in a hotel with no security. If you’re that famous and you put all your jewellery on the internet then you go to a hotel where nobody can come near to the room.
“You cannot display your wealth and then be surprised that some people want to share it with you.”
It came just weeks after Kardashian West professed deep admiration for the German designer, saying that it was her “dream come true” when he gifted her two Chanel bags.
Also at the Chanel show, Courtney Love, who sat next to Kardashian at the Givenchy show on the eve of the robbery, spoke of her profound shock.
But she said that it wouldn’t make her reconsider coming back to the City of Light.
“As a friend of hers, I feel very horrified. ... I don’t know what went on with security,” she said.
“It was terrible. ... [But] I don’t see the underbelly so much. Maybe I should more. It’s a bubble for me,” Love told the AP.
But only last year, the former Hole singer wasn’t so unfazed by Paris turmoil, when she had her car attacked by striking taxi drivers.
“The Uber thing, that was terrifying,” she acknowledged at Tuesday’s show.
Last June, Love made headlines by tweeting: “They’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage,” and “They’re beating the cars with metal bats. This is France?? I’m safer in Baghdad.”
As the gang remained on the loose there were unconfirmed reports that two men had been tailing Kardashian West in the days before the robbery. One reportedly posed as a paparazzi photographer on a motorbike and another as a plain-clothes policeman, trying to gain access to the building where she was staying. Police suspect the incident could have been an “inside job” with someone in Kardashian West’s entourage, or a wider acquaintance in the fashion world, tipping off the criminals that her bodyguard Pascal Duvier would not be present when they struck. He was escorting Kardashian West’s sisters to a nightclub at the time.
Duvier has been spoken to by police and is not suspected of having any links to the robbery.
Johanna Primevert, chief spokeswoman for the Paris police department, said: “It was really the celebrity who was targeted with possessions that had been seen and noticed via social media, and it was these goods that the attackers targeted.”
Charles Pellegrini, the former head of France’s anti-organised crime squad, said: “If I’m the owner of a hotel and I get Kim Kardashian, I double, triple my security procedures, I put agents at each exit.”
Paris prosecutor’s officers confirmed that Kardashian West was lying in bed in a bathrobe when the masked men burst in. She told police the robbers spoke perfect French but demanded her jewellery in pidgin English, saying: “Ring, ring, ring!”.
