Eight hours before the 2023 Met Gala, fans were already camped outside the New York City museum, hoping to get a front-row view of their favorite stars at fashion’s biggest night. (Some had taken off their shoes and sat on the sidewalk to get comfortable; others had bags of food with them for sustenance during the long day ahead.) Across the street, journalists; representatives from Chanel, Fendi, and the Karl Lagerfeld brand; friends of Condé Nast and Anna Wintour, and more insiders filed into the museum for a preview of “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” the Costume Institute exhibition at the center of all this Met Gala commotion. The show aims to capture Lagerfeld’s impact upon fashion—both the insular industry and the way folks dress on Main Street—his connection to pop culture writ large, and how he transformed the art of clothing design itself. Featuring nearly 200 items including sketches and garments from Lagerfeld’s 65-year career at the helm of the aforementioned houses as well as his time at Balmain, Chloé, and Patou, the exhibition is a thorough survey of Lagerfeld’s many spectacular looks.
The clothes are certainly the focal point of the muted exhibition, which springs to life via a video projected onto the opening wall that shows Lagerfeld’s fingerless glove-clad hands sketching dresses. Each of the show’s winding, convex rooms are themed according to “Lines” of his work, for instance “Masculine Line/Feminine Line” and “Romantic Line/Military Line,” demonstrating the duality and layered nature of Lagerfeld’s creative vision. The first room features some Chanel greats on one side (glittering skirt suits, a gown with a cascading fish scale-like train) and a handful of Fendi furs and textured dresses on the other—a true fashion face-off. Above those dresses, video footage of interviews with seamstresses who worked closest with Lagerfeld in the Chanel atelier; below them, the typical museum placard features an added…
Read the full article here
