The Costume Institute’s Spring Exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” has opened for press previews and was celebrated at the Met Gala. The announcement of this year’s theme has sparked mixed reactions. Lagerfeld, a longtime friend of Anna Wintour and adored by many celebrities, passed away in 2019 after a seven-decade career in the fashion industry. While some applaud the decision to honor Lagerfeld, others have criticized the choice, questioning why the industry would celebrate a bigoted white man when there are so many revolutionary designers who are not.
Despite the controversy surrounding Lagerfeld’s legacy, his work was honored at the Met Gala and in a retrospective of his career, opening to the public on May 5. The exhibition features 200 pieces of his work; showcasing looks he created while at various fashion houses, including Fendi, Chloé, and, most notably, Chanel. The show is dedicated to highlighting Lagerfeld’s unique and signature style, expressed through a vocabulary of aesthetic and conceptual themes that appear time and time again in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019.
The exhibition deliberately avoids engaging with any of the questionable things Lagerfeld said. Curator Andrew Bolton stated,
We decided to present a thematic and conceptual essay on Karl’s work rather than a traditional retrospective in the hope that it might prove more revelatory about his creativity. We didn’t want to emphasize Karl, the man who has long been the subject of breathless mythologizing largely as a result of his own bodacious self-invention, but instead, we wanted to focus on Karl, the designer.”
At the exhibition’s press conference, supermodel and former First Lady of France Carla Bruni spoke warmly of Lagerfeld, saying, “He was a universally curious man; he was interested in everything, in everyone. Everything interested him except mediocrity.” This sentiment set the tone for the exhibition, which, in keeping with the fashion industry’s tendency to focus on the highly curated outer shells of designers, chose to emphasize Lagerfeld’s artful designs and creative process rather than engaging with any of the troubling aspects of his personal beliefs and statements.
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo © Julia Hetta
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art