The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has sued a British writer in the Paris courts for breaching his privacy in a book that recounts the wild-living heyday of the Chanel couturier and his great rival Yves Saint-Laurent.

Judges are due to rule next month on the demand by Mr Lagerfeld, 73, for €35,000 (£23,000) in damages over Alicia Drake’s The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris.

The book depicted the Seventies as a golden age and Mr Lagerfeld and Mr Saint-Laurent as its flamboyant stars. After its publication, Mr Lagerfeld wrote to Ms Drake complaining about inaccuracies.

The book covers Mr Lagerfeld’s long-running vendetta with Mr Saint-Laurent. The two men had both burst on to the fashion scene in 1954, aged 21 and 18, as winners of a design competition. The pair moved in different circles, although they once shared a boyfriend, according to the book.

One description of Mr Lagerfeld in the 1960s reads: “He spent his days between the Café de Flore, the Brasserie Lipp and an open-air swimming pool . . . It was a fabulous haunt for picking up and posing. People would stare open-mouthed as Karl strutted across the decking, wearing high heels and an all-in-one swimsuit.”

The book claims that Mr Lagerfeld had embellished his life story. Rather than a grand estate, his childhood home in Germany was a small mansion near Hamburg, said Ms Drake, who spent six years researching her book. “Everything he came from was grey, flat and colourless,” she wrote. Mr Lagerfeld has described his upbringing in a country château with a multitude of servants. He has said that he sought a valet at the age of 4 and had a bicycle for every day of the week.

Mr Lagerfeld, whose original name was Lagerfeldt, has always cultivated mystery. He used to claim that he was born in 1938 until the German media produced records showing his date of birth to have been 1933.

In his autumn complaint to Ms Drake, Mr Lagerfeld told the Paris-based fashion writer that her book was “more based on suppositions and improvised conclusions than on truth”. He challenged the accuracy of accounts that she had been given from relatives.

He had initially sought €100,000 in damages, a ban in France on the book and €10,000 for every copy sold in the country. Fewer than 50 have been sold in France and it was no longer available there.

Mr Lagerfeld’s complaint to the court did not concern the book’s account of his childhood or his age. Ms Drake and her lawyer did not say what he was objecting to. Mr Lagerfeld’s lawyer was unavailable.

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