When someone creates everlasting, unswerving beauty, making unique, aesthetically compelling clothing to dress models and muses who are just as beautiful, the world takes notice. And so it is—many controversies apparently set aside—that controversial German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is the inspiration behind this year’s Met Gala theme—the curiously titled Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.
The Gala will be put together in part, as always, by Vogue creative director and Lagerfeld confidante Anna Wintour. Co-chairing the event will be actress Penélope Cruz, pop star Dua Lipa, tennis legend Roger Federer, and brilliant jack-of-all TV trades Michaela Coel. Some commentators have questioned why some of Lagerfeld’s other major muses, like Cara Delevingne or Keira Knightley, weren’t selected to lead the event. The Daily Beast reached out to Condé Nast and Wintour for comment.
When Lagerfeld, creative director at Chanel for the past 30 years and an undeniable cultural figure in his own right, died in 2019, an avatar disappeared along with him. With his instantly recognizable uniform of a slicked-back, pure white ponytail, a high, starched collar and opaque black sunglasses, Lagerfeld the embodiment of the fashion world, in all of its ridiculousness, mystery and flair.
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But how will a Lagerfeld-themed Met Gala dress code—Vogue’s latest announcement just says, “in honor of Karl”—play out in practice? Clues can be found within the accompanying exhibition providing the impetus behind the gala: the Costume Institute show will track Lagerfeld’s most important design creations from the 1950s all the way up through 2019, the year he produced his last collection.
“Karl Lagerfeld was a very intelligent, talented designer who truly captured the zeitgeist of the time,” fashion designer Diane Von Furstenburg told The Daily Beast after Lagerfeld died in 2019. “His curiosity and appetite for books was insatiable, his wit irresistible, and his unique way of being present yet detached kept him in an aura of mystery. He became a legend and will be very missed.”
However, separating the art from the artist is a pastime that’s consumed our cultural landscape over the last decade or so, making it impossible to assess a person’s work without taking their worst moments into consideration.
Karl Lagerfeld and model Cara Delevingne appear at the end of the runway during the Chanel show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2014-2015 on March 4, 2014 in Paris, France.
Francois Durand/Getty ImagesLagerfeld, the former head of Chanel and an ingratiated major contributor to several other luxury brands, was, in his later years, just as well known for his flagrantly out-of-date opinions—he bemoaned women getting “too fat,” and expressed his exasperation with the #MeToo movement—as he was for his innovations in high fashion design.
“If you don't want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model,” Lagerfeld said on another occasion. “Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent. They’re recruiting even!”
Somehow, though, these verbal missteps haven’t really erased his cultural footprint, whether via the fur-heavy, logo-drenched, boxy suit-laden reinvention of the Chanel brand he kicked off in tandem with launching his own label, or in his high-profile bonds with muses like French It-Girl model Inès de La Fressange (he preferred to outfit her in pink peplum and feathers) and grungy American actress Kristen Stewart (sliced-up tweed).
As with the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala theme of 2022, “Gilded Glamour,” there’s an upscale quality to this year's title, but not a lot of instant curb appeal that springs to mind with a Lagerfeld theme: sure, he was a highly relevant arbiter of high taste and poise, but what does “lines of beauty” even mean?
“The exhibition will explore Lagerfeld’s complex working methodology, tracing the evolution of his fashions from the two dimensional to the three dimensional,” Costume Institute head curator Andrew Bolton said in a statement. “The fluid lines of his sketches found expression in recurring aesthetic themes in his fashions.”
“This immersive exhibition will unpack his singular artistic practice, inviting the public to experience an essential part of Lagerfeld’s boundless imagination and passion for innovation,” Max Hollein, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, added in a statement of his own.
“I don’t know that you always see the same themes throughout his work,” celebrity stylist Amanda Sanders told The Daily Beast. “With each house he designed differently, as each house should, because they all work with different founders and the different designers have different teams.”
“But I think he really came full circle with Chanel because he used the logo in so many identifiable ways,” Sanders said. “Before Karl came along, the Chanel Double C logo was not marketed the same way. The Cs were not branded on clothing so much or on jewelry. Their offerings were originally much more subtle, until he came around.”
His greatest creation, though, might have been his own, ruthlessly well-branded persona. “I’ve joked that Karl was a one-man superbrand, as distinctive as the Chanel suit he imbued with a second life,” Wintour wrote after Lagerfeld's death.
“He had a uniform that he carried later in life,” Sanders said. Therefore, a lot of celebrities might take a tongue in cheek angle and show up to the Met Gala wearing “white powdered wigs and black suits and white shirts,” she added.
“That’s what I’m assuming people are going to do,” fashion archivist Rashida Ward agreed. “I know Kris Jenner is gonna have, like, a walking stick. That actually would be funny: A Night of a Thousand Karls.”
Linda Evangelista and Karl Lagerfeld attend a Chanel fashion event in New York City on September 12, 1991.
Sonia Moskowitz/Getty ImagesLagerfeld was best known as Chanel’s head honcho, but he also spent more than 30 years at Fendi and also carried on a near-tw0 decade collaboration with Chloé.
At Chloé, like with his 1983 “Aurélien” dress design, Lagerfeld tended to let himself get much weirder; the garment has a guitar design splashed across the front. In comparison, at Chanel, he loved toying with both the subversion of the brand’s iconic skirt suit and experimenting with explosions of tulle maximalism. And he spent an astonishing 50 years at Fendi, reviving the baguette bag and overseeing the brand’s launch of its first ready-to-wear collection in 1977.
“He’s done so much work for Chloé and that archive has sort of been overlooked, people don’t necessarily talk about that as much,” Ward told The Daily Beast. “I haven’t really seen a lot of his early design work for other houses in the ’60s and ’70s, so that’s what I'm really excited for.”
“In terms of the red carpet, I’m not really expecting anything,” Ward said. “I want to see other designers interpret that Chanel look.”
After Lagerfeld took over Chanel in the late ’80s, he transformed the brand from a stuffy, upscale couture house meant for older women with stuffy husbands into a youthful, logo-driven powerhouse that made everything from quilted handbags to streetwear to long chain necklaces dripping with pearls.
“Karl liked drama and the spectacle of extravaganza, and he liked to use over-the-top, tulle, pearls, chains, feathers and lace,” Sanders told The Daily Beast. “I think it will be a really fun Met Gala red carpet.”
