There is a scene late in “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” the six-part streaming series on Hulu about the early Paris career of the famed German designer, that features a youngish Karl talking to his mother, who has just had a stroke and whom he has installed in an elaborate château in the French countryside. He is in despair. Without her, Mr. Lagerfeld says, there will be no one who knows the real him.

“Who cares?” she effectively replies, suggesting that the created self is so much more interesting.

For decades, this was essentially dogma in fashion. Great designers were often synonymous with fantasists and mythmakers, not only when it came to their clothes but to their life as well. Their homes were extraordinary stage sets; their self-presentation an invention; their speech populated with exaggerated edicts and ultimatums.

Their fans consumed these caricatures the way they consumed their clothes, the image feeding the popular narrative of the creative genius. Few were better at it than Mr. Lagerfeld, who with his powdered ponytail, dark glasses and fingerless motocross gloves was a cartoon unto himself, but he was far from the only one.

Dior with his white coats fit the bill; so did Chanel with her ropes of pearls and cigarette holders. John Galliano with his costumery did too, as did Tom Ford with his porn-lord shades and undone shirts.

And so it was for years. Recently, however, a different trend has emerged. It’s one that takes the form of three streaming series dedicated to revealing the designers behind the clothes; to stripping off the masks of the monstres sacrés and exposing them in all their human fallibility.

First up was “Cristóbal Balenciaga,” a look at the career arc of the Spanish master and the trauma he suffered as a closeted gay man and with the advent of ready-to-wear. (That series, which aired in several countries earlier this year, is not yet available in the United States.) Then came “The New Look,” which focused on Christian Dior, his daddy issues and dependence on tarot cards, and Coco Chanel and the terrible moral choices those designers made to keep their businesses going during World War II.

“Becoming Karl,” which depicts the rivalry between Mr. Lagerfeld and his peer, Yves Saint Laurent, focuses on Mr. Lagerfeld’s apparently enormous inferiority complex and the two men’s rivalry for the love of Jacques de Bascher. It is simply the latest entrant in a new genre that could be called “Designers, they’re just like us!”

But do we want them to be?

Film has been dancing around fashion for decades, ever since Kay Thompson declared “Think pink!” in “Funny Face” in 1957, drawn to the subject because of the razzle-dazzle it seems to promise. With a few notable exceptions, the result is often over the top or absurd, in part because it’s hard to dramatize an industry already busy dramatizing itself. That’s why documentaries like “Dior and I” or “Valentino: The Last Emperor” seem more effective. These new biopics are trying to find a middle ground.

But turning what has become an abstract, broadly palatable brand into an actual person raises, once again, the complicated question of how to think of the relationship between the artist and their art. Whether or not you wear Chanel or Dior, they have become part of the shared cultural vernacular, their style so omnipresent it acts as a general reference point. But if their creators, who reshaped wardrobes across the world and with them the tools of identity, are themselves identified in all their frailty and occasional ugliness, does that make their legacy more appealing, or less?

“Becoming Karl,” which covers Mr. Lagerfeld’s career at Chloé and Fendi and ends with his job offer from Chanel, the brand that truly made him famous, manages the unlikely feat of turning Mr. Lagerfeld, who was both an extraordinarily talented designer and a pretty terrible person — racist, sizeist, demanding, cruel as well as brilliant and erudite — into a sympathetic character. There is Karl self-medicating with chocolate, strapping himself into a corset and dancing alone in his room rather than braving the possibility of rejection. There is pain under the pantomime of fabulosity.

By limiting its purview to the time before Mr. Lagerfeld’s fame and power allowed him to pontificate with impunity, and by passing the blame to his terrible mother and a Parisian world that looked down on him as German (Pierre Bergé, the partner of Yves Saint Laurent, is the villain here), the series offers an alternative narrative. Just as “The New Look” paints Dior as something of a trembling flower, a victim of a terrible father, and Chanel as a product of her experience as a single woman fighting for her own survival. If she got a friend addicted to drugs and tried to use Nazi laws to reclaim her business … well, needs must.

Designing clothes is not an inherently dramatic act, which may be why the show runners decided to focus on the people. Yet these characters — Dior, Chanel, Lagerfeld, Balenciaga — changed not just how we dress, but how we think about fashion. Chanel liberated women from the corset and created the jacket-as-cardigan and the little black dress (among other enduring tropes). Dior invented the New Look and galvanized a generation of shoppers. Balenciaga gave us the sack dress, the egg coat, the baby doll and the belief in fashion as a religion. Lagerfeld took all that and made it part of pop culture.

They created legacies powerful enough to resonate across the decades and signatures clear enough for their names to continue in the hands of others, which is why they loom so large in the popular imagination. It’s why they matter in the first place. Why, in fact, these series could even exist.

And yet the subjects of the series always understood that the essence of their success was a mirage: that what they were selling was the magical promise of transformation through stuff; through wool, silk and chiffon; through the glorious illusion of chic associated with their names. Not, in the end, their reality.

Daniel Brühl had just started shooting the series “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld” in Paris last year, and he could feel the French crew’s eyes on him. The German actor, who was playing the title role, was all nerves. After his first few days on set, he returned to his dressing room to find an enormous bouquet of, as he put it, “the biggest and reddest roses I’ve seen in my life.” There wasn’t any note.

When Brühl put the flowers in a vase at home later, however, he spotted a small card tucked among them. “It said ‘For Karlito, from Jacquot,’” he recalled in a video interview. “Nothing else.”

He realized the gift was from his co-star Théodore Pellerin, a Canadian actor who portrays Lagerfeld’s great love, Jacques de Bascher; Pellerin had signed the card with their characters’ nicknames. Brühl knew then that he and the series, which revolves around the intense love story between the two men, would be fine.

“Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” which premieres on Friday on Hulu, is set mostly in the 1970s, a decade that was key to Lagerfeld’s development as a fashion designer as well as his personal evolution. It was before he formed his distinctive look of a sharp-angled figure decked out in monochromatic costumes, high collars, black gloves — though the tinted glasses and signature ponytail make their appearance. tinted glasses and a signature ponytail. Like Andy Warhol, another secretive pop-culture icon, Lagerfeld meticulously manufactured his public identity, Brühl said: “So who was the person before he was famous?”

Brühl briefly met Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, about 20 years ago on a photo shoot and remembers him as “very charming.” When Brühl had to become the designer, he did a deep dive, reading up, for example, on the many artistic fields Lagerfeld had been interested in: “literature, arts, architecture, design, and fashion, of course,” Brühl said. “I wasn’t bored a single second spending time with Karl Lagerfeld.”

Still, there needed to be a way in, and for the creator and showrunner Isaure Pisani-Ferry, it was de Bascher, who was 21 to the designer’s 38 when they met. “It was this moment in the ’70s when he falls in love, which means loss of control — and this is a man who needs to be in control” Pisani-Ferry said of Lagerfeld in a video conversation.

De Bascher was the opposite, a dandy who enjoyed dissolute idleness with an elegant insouciance. His indolence and penchant for excess both fascinated and troubled Lagerfeld, a workaholic who did not drink or do drugs, and did not seem interested in sex, either. Lagerfeld later said they never consummated their relationship, and an idiosyncratic seduction sequence is among the most poignant scenes in the series.

Lagerfeld’s self-possession translated to a perpetually composed demeanor. In the show, rare glimpses of his inner turmoil come when he devours a lemon tart or a chocolate bar with a pleasureless intensity. “Why is this person so guarded?” Brühl wondered. “What is he afraid of? Fear, as we know, is always such an interesting motive. But it was fear on the one hand and extreme courage on the other hand, because he made his way as a gay young German in the ’70s, when being German in Paris was not precisely the most attractive thing.”

This was a stark contrast to de Bascher, who came from a noble provincial family and inserted himself into the Parisian elite with ease. Frustrated by Lagerfeld’s restraint, the young dilettante simply looked elsewhere for his fun, most notoriously with Lagerfeld’s longtime frenemy Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois), who became obsessed with him.

While Saint Laurent has very little screen time in the series, he has an outsize impact. He constantly haunts Lagerfeld, who was acutely aware of his own artistic shortcomings in comparison with his brilliant, groundbreaking rival.

“Lagerfeld was superior to those who surrounded him then, a lot more cultured and refined, and likely smarter and more of a strategist, but it was painful to him to see that he wasn’t a genius,” said Raphaëlle Bacqué, an investigative reporter for Le Monde. Bacqué’s biography, “Kaiser Karl,” inspired “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” and she is an executive producer of the show.

Lagerfeld’s complicated relationship with Saint Laurent was a major source of inspiration for Brühl, who has worked steadily in Europe and Hollywood since his breakthrough 20 years ago in the film “Goodbye Lenin!”. (His next projects include Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci’s upcoming HBO series “The Franchise” and the film “Eden” with Ron Howard.)

“What always interests me in life is envy and jealousy, and as an actor this Mozart-Salieri dynamic with Saint Laurent was always a very strong, guiding motif,” Brühl said. “It explains a lot of his love, hatred, frustration, motivation and the fire that he had in himself to become someone. But there was a complex that never quite disappeared because he knew that ultimately Saint Laurent will always be regarded as the god and as the artist.”

When de Bascher began sleeping with Saint Laurent, it made things even more complicated for Lagerfeld, Pisani-Ferry said: “You have the feelings and the professional, the need for recognition and the question of sexuality all mixed up in this one phase of his life.”

Lagerfeld supported de Bascher financially and introduced him to his circles. But he also benefited professionally from the relationship. De Bascher was a source of inspiration for Lagerfeld, providing a connection to Paris’s ebullient, creatively fertile nightlife. As Jérôme Salle, an executive producer who also directed three of the show’s six episodes, points out, Paris was a heady place in the 1970s.

“It was super-creative, super-crazy,” he said. “It was this magical moment between the sexual revolution and AIDS.”

De Bascher made the most of that window, and the show spends plenty of time with this proto-influencer who made money from his leisure as best he could.

“He was influential through his style, his taste for the nightlife, the freedom with which he led his life,” Bacqué said. “Isaure is more lenient toward him, whereas I have mixed feelings: His laziness and his flippancy are exasperating, but at the same time he’s attractive.”

All involved with “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld” agree that whatever the imbalance between Lagerfeld and de Bascher’s attitudes and abilities, their bond was real, even if it defied convention. Salle said that “for Jacques, the love is very sincere, and Karl loves Jacques as much as he can love someone.”

“What is very moving for me — and I spoke about that a lot with Daniel and Théodore — is that yes, this love story was toxic,” he said. “But they did love each other.”