KARL LAGERFELD: A LINE OF BEAUTY

The controversy around the latest exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, erupted as soon as the exhibition was announced in October 2022. Lagerfeld, once fashion’s undisputed emperor, was now seen by many as a relic of an industry dominated by Euro-centric ideals in dire need of diversifying. Online, fashion historians and critics expressed concerns about the celebratory stage the Costume Institute was likely to provide Lagerfeld’s legacy, without much attention to the views he publicly expressed, considered by many to be anti-fat, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic.


Image: Rachmaninoff Dress, Chloe, Spring 2019. Image above: detail of Composite image, Julia Hetta, 2023. 

Perhaps anticipating such criticism, Andrew Bolton, Melissa Huber, and Amanda Harlech, the exhibition’s curatorial team, focused on “Lagerfeld the designer” rather than Lagerfeld the man. To achieve this goal, they turned to a seventh-century concept termed a “line of beauty.”  Introduced by British artist William Hogarth in his book The Analysis of Beauty, it suggests that a serpentine S-shaped line represents liveliness and movement, while straight lines invoke stillness and inactivity. The exhibition is organised around the theoretical framework that Lagerfeld, in contrast, considered both lines equally beautiful.


Image: Sketch, Rachmaninoff Dress, CHLOE, Spring 1973. 

The galleries, designed by the architect Tadao Ando, similarly echo the theme with curvatures contrasted with sharp turns. Each gallery illustrates the duality in Lagerfeld’s designs throughout a career spanning sixty-five years and four fashion brands: Chloe, Fendi, Chanel, and his namesake line. Galleries with themes such as “Feminine Line/Masculine Line,” “Romantic Line/Military Line,” “Historical Line/Futuristic Line,” “Canonical Line/Countercultural Line,” and “Artisanal Line/Mechanical Line,” reveal the duality and contradiction in Lagerfeld’s aesthetic while giving visitors a panoramic view of the designer’s career across the four brands, as well as his early work at houses such as Patou and Balmain.


Image: Coat, Fendi, fall, 2000.

The view is indeed breathtaking. From his seat at the top of the fashion world, Lagerfeld was able to deploy the most skilled artisans and the most luxurious materials to realise his creative vision.


Image: Karl Lagerfeld Portrait. © Annie Leibovitz.

Throughout his career, and increasingly in his role as Creative Director at the House of Chanel, Lagerfeld remained committed to preserving couture craft traditions. Chanel famously acquired artisanal workshops such as Lemarié, which specialises in feathers and artificial flowers, the milliners Maison Michele, and the famed embroidery house of Lesage. In keeping with the exhibition’s focus on lines, the galleries are strung with Lagerfeld’s own fashion illustrations. Sketching was his main mode of communicating with the premières d’atelier, the women and men charged with translating the two-dimensional sketches into three-dimensional garments, from ink on paper into fabric on body. A narrow passage funnels visitors into a promising kick off, a gallery focusing on the premières’ work.


Image: Dress, Chanel, Spring, 2019.

It is the fashion industry’s open secret that behind every famous designer there is an army of invisible workers and interns, predominantly female, who execute the designer’s vision. Yet, their talent is so rarely credited or acknowledged. A series of video interviews conducted by the French filmmaker Loïc Prigent, gives centre stage to Lagerfeld’s premières as full collaborators in the design process. Lagerfeld considered them the “architects of his vision” and their interviews alongside the clothes they helped realise, pull back the curtain from not only the myth of the genius designer but also from the glamour of the industry: the unassuming premières, we learn, are equally essential to the business of luxury fashion. Their passion for the job and their incredible know-how underlines that such high level of garment-making is the product of not one, but of many people.


Image: Runway, Wedding Dress, Chanel, Spring, 2005. 

Despite the exciting beginning, the exhibition’s framework starts collapsing onto itself when visitors leave behind the premières and move into the thematic galleries, where the work of seamstresses, pattern-makers, craftspeople, and other fashion professionals recedes into the background in favour of a dazzling tour de force of Lagerfeld’s distinct aesthetic. The curators insist that the exhibition is not a retrospective, but rather a conceptual essay about Lagerfeld’s work. The expansive survey of Lagerfeld’s creativity falls within the Oxford dictionary’s definition of a retrospective as “an exhibition or compilation showing the development of the work of a particular artist over a period of time.” While the exhibition is not organised chronologically, it does start from Lagerfeld the student and ends with Lagerfeld “The Puppet:” a gallery devoted to Lagerfeld’s self-representation, which by the last decade of his life could be summarised with a ponytail, a white collar, and black sunglasses.


Image: Sketch, Coat, Chanel, fall, 2017. 

The distillation of the self into three essential and instantaneously recognisable elements further undermines the curatorial aspiration to separate the designer from the man. Lagerfeld the man: his hands (through the sketches), his body (through imagery and objects), and even his words (through myriad quotes printed on labels and walls) are omnipresent throughout the exhibition. “I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives,” Lagerfeld is quoted, “I want to be an apparition. I appear, then disappear.” The curators, it seems, responded enthusiastically to this call. By avoiding his complicated history, however, they inadvertently summoned the ghost of “Lagerfeld the man,” who hovers over their exhibition, disappearing only to reappear elsewhere.


Image: Runway, Chloe, Spring, 1973. 

Lagerfeld was an obsessive researcher and student of history, exemplified at the top of the show with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz depicting his iconic silhouette amongst stacks of books, magazines, and sketchpads. He famously immersed himself in collecting artefacts and decorating his apartment entirely in one on style, only to later discard everything and replace it with a new obsession. If there is one advantage to the thematic organisation, it is the opportunity to panoramically review Lagerfeld’s interests applied and adjusted for each brand. The visitor is reminded that Lagerfeld was simultaneously designing for three brands with distinct aesthetics, yet he was able to retain his unique footprint. The exhibition leaves no doubt that Lagerfeld was a prolific and energetic designer and that he had a profound influence on the fashion world since the 1960s. The big gaping question remains: can we, or should we, separate the man from his work?


Image: Dress, Karl Lagerfeld, fall 1985. 

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty is on show at The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art until 16 July 2023.

Find out more: 
www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/a-line-of-beauty

Text by Keren Ben-Horin