On Friday morning, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a press conference in Paris to announce the theme of the 2023 Costume Institute exhibit — fitting, as it’ll be a Karl Lagerfeld retrospective.
As Fashionista reports, the event, which was co-hosted by Wendy Yu Curator at Large Andrew Bolton and Vogue Global Editorial Director (and Met trustee) Anna Wintour, confirmed rumors that have been swirling since the summer of 2019, a few months after the designer passed away. According to WWD, the original plan was to mount a retrospective on Lagerfeld’s career in 2022, but that was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The exhibition was conceived of immediately after we lost Karl three years ago, and we’re so excited to be presenting it to you now,” Wintour told the audience assembled in Lagerfeld’s former photo studio at 7L for the announcement. “Karl Lagerfeld was my friend, a true and wonderful friend over many decades. We shared adventures and humor and compliments, good times and tough times, but I admire him more than anything as a designer,” she added. “The most vivid memories are of him surrounded by paper and by books and hard at work sketching.”
On view at the Met’s Tisch Gallery from May 5 through July 16 2023, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” — named after painter William Hogarth’s theory of the same name — will follow Lagerfeld’s career, from his beginnings as Pierre Balmain’s apprentice, to his first creative-director gig at Jean Patou, to his most well-known stints: at Chloé, Fendi and Chanel. It’ll be sponsored by Chanel, Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld and Condé Nast. The Met Gala will take place on May 1.
Winter has said that Lagerfeld’s career was “full of paradoxes. Karl was the king of commerce, but he was also fashion’s greatest intellectual, one of the best-read people I have ever met. He did extraordinary things for some of our glorious heritage houses, yet he was always at the front edge of the new and hungry for the next thing. He became the most renowned fashion celebrity ever, a man more recognizable and quoted than many of the very famous people that he dressed. But he was also an intensely private person. How those paradoxical pieces made a whole, how they added up to a single line of lifelong work from one artist’s imagination, was the deep mystery of Karl, even to those of us who knew and loved him. And it’s what Andrew’s brilliant exhibition brings into focus definitively for the first time.”
According to Fashionista, Lagerfeld’s work for Chanel has been displayed at the Met before. In 2005, the museum had an exhibition on the house, which featured Coco Chanel’s work juxtaposed alongside Lagerfeld’s; the Costume Institute also has pieces he designed for his namesake brand, Chloé and Fendi in its collection. And, Lagerfeld also famously staged Chanel’s 2019 Métiers d’art collection at the Met, around the Temple of Dendur.
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