For fashion insiders and fashion obsessives, May is Met Gala month. Everything surrounding the star-studded event is newsworthy, from the way it illustrates how fashion and art are indelibly intertwined—consider Kim Kardashian’s head-to-toe black Balenciaga, Janelle Monaé’s custom Christian Siriano or Jared Leto’s everything—to annual themes like punk, Catholicism, camp, La Belle Epoque, haute couture, Victorian dress and very occasionally, an icon.
Forty years ago, the 1983 Met Gala honored Yves Saint Laurent. Thirty years ago, the event celebrated Diana Vreeland’s journalistic and fashion career. This year, the late iconoclastic German fashion designer, creative director, artist and photographer Karl Lagerfeld was the focal point of the Gala and the Costume Institute’s spring 2023 exhibition, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.
The peripatetic designer, who died in 2019, may have been divided if he’d known a Met Gala would be held in his honor. He did love attention, but he was also adamant that he would not reflect or become nostalgic about what he’d done—even his last season’s collection. Yet he also believed he was fated for greatness, and to that end, a collective of the most high-profile and au courant celebrities, models, designers and media stylecasters discussing his life and work would almost certainly delight him. He wrote in The World According to Karl that he’d always known he “would be this sort of legend.”
Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, curated by Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2015, will showcase close to 150 of Lagerfeld’s designs, along with many original sketches, illustrating the designer’s ideas and the realization of his vision, which ultimately hinged on deep relationships between Lagerfeld and the…
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