Baptiste Giabiconi was working as a mechanical fitter at Eurocopter in Marseille when a scout spotted him at his sports club in 2007 and pushed him into modeling. The introduction that mattered came the following year, when he met Karl Lagerfeld on a Chanel set on June 8, 2008, a date he later had tattooed on his skin.

Lagerfeld cast him in the first campaign for his own namesake label, then kept him inside Chanel and Fendi through the years that followed, photographing much of that work himself. Frankie Morello, Just Cavalli and Armani Jeans also booked him during that stretch, but one designer’s eye defined the career.

That eye gave Baptiste a visibility few models of his generation matched. Where most male models cycle through agencies and photographers to stay in view, he stayed inside a single house’s image machine for more than a decade, on the runway and in front of Lagerfeld’s own camera.

Baptiste turned that platform into a parallel career in music, releasing the single “Showtime” in 2010 and the album Oxygen in September 2012, which entered the SNEP French chart at number one.

He wrote about his bond with Lagerfeld at length in the 2020 memoir Karl et moi, describing it as closer to father and son than designer and muse, the record of a partnership that shaped both the runway years and the years after them.