"Flex your creative": the Met Gala and Karl Lagerfeld collide
Karl Lagerfeld, fashion's greatest showman, has reinvented the catwalk as an entertainment channel. His Paris shows featured a supermarket selling Coco "Chanel" Pops, a replica of the Eiffel Tower and a spaceship that exploded from the ground in a blaze of smoke.
Similarly, the annual Met Gala transformed the tradition of black-tie museum fundraising dinners into the most spectacular night on the fashion calendar. Forget the little black dresses; think of Rihanna as the pope, Kim Kardashian in a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe and Katy Perry carrying a cheeseburger.
This Monday night, the two will reunite in what s heralds a perfect storm of theatrical red carpet on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The dress code for this year's Met Gala, hosted by Anna Wintour, Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer and Dua Lipa, is "dress in honor of Karl". The night celebrates the opening of Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, an extensive retrospective of the designer's 65-year career, who died in 2019.
Some reviewers predicted a sea sunglasses, fans and powdered wigs in a "night of a thousand Karls", but Andrew Bolton, the curator of the exhibition, hopes they are wrong. "I'd like to see a lot of nice vintage pieces - Chanel, Chloe, Fendi, maybe even a bit of [Jean] Patou [where Lagerfeld worked in the late 1950s] if they can find it. I would prefer to far to see that rather than full of black and white Karl lookalikes."
Bolton's exhibition questions how to celebrate a genius with a pointed legacy. Lagerfeld said of Princess Diana that "she was pretty and sweet, but she was stupid" and described Adele as "a little too fat". dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class=" dcr-173mewl">
"If Karl was at the peak of his career in today's landscape, he would be called out for some of the comments he made, and rightly so,” said Hattie Brett, editor-in-chief of Grazia. "But I also know I'd be curious about his view of today's world. Would we have seen the man who said sweatpants were a sign of having given up on life embracing them in the pandemic, I wonder?"
Lagerfeld, a lifelong champion windsurfer, was posthumously stranded by cultural change. The decades on either side of the millennium when Karl was in his prime were a time when rude and reckless behavior was widely tolerated in the creative industries, a stark contrast to a current culture that demands and expects sensitivities to be respected. But while his fat phobia makes him out of his time, Lagerfeld is entirely relevant to a generation of modern creative directors. Designer-turned-director Tom Ford and musician-designers Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams were all creative polymaths who followed a blueprint forged by Lagerfeld, whom Bolton describes as "a modern-day Warholian god of commerce and communication. ".
Karl Lagerfeld, fashion's greatest showman, has reinvented the catwalk as an entertainment channel. His Paris shows featured a supermarket selling Coco "Chanel" Pops, a replica of the Eiffel Tower and a spaceship that exploded from the ground in a blaze of smoke.
Similarly, the annual Met Gala transformed the tradition of black-tie museum fundraising dinners into the most spectacular night on the fashion calendar. Forget the little black dresses; think of Rihanna as the pope, Kim Kardashian in a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe and Katy Perry carrying a cheeseburger.
This Monday night, the two will reunite in what s heralds a perfect storm of theatrical red carpet on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The dress code for this year's Met Gala, hosted by Anna Wintour, Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer and Dua Lipa, is "dress in honor of Karl". The night celebrates the opening of Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, an extensive retrospective of the designer's 65-year career, who died in 2019.
Some reviewers predicted a sea sunglasses, fans and powdered wigs in a "night of a thousand Karls", but Andrew Bolton, the curator of the exhibition, hopes they are wrong. "I'd like to see a lot of nice vintage pieces - Chanel, Chloe, Fendi, maybe even a bit of [Jean] Patou [where Lagerfeld worked in the late 1950s] if they can find it. I would prefer to far to see that rather than full of black and white Karl lookalikes."
Bolton's exhibition questions how to celebrate a genius with a pointed legacy. Lagerfeld said of Princess Diana that "she was pretty and sweet, but she was stupid" and described Adele as "a little too fat". dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class=" dcr-173mewl">
"If Karl was at the peak of his career in today's landscape, he would be called out for some of the comments he made, and rightly so,” said Hattie Brett, editor-in-chief of Grazia. "But I also know I'd be curious about his view of today's world. Would we have seen the man who said sweatpants were a sign of having given up on life embracing them in the pandemic, I wonder?"
Lagerfeld, a lifelong champion windsurfer, was posthumously stranded by cultural change. The decades on either side of the millennium when Karl was in his prime were a time when rude and reckless behavior was widely tolerated in the creative industries, a stark contrast to a current culture that demands and expects sensitivities to be respected. But while his fat phobia makes him out of his time, Lagerfeld is entirely relevant to a generation of modern creative directors. Designer-turned-director Tom Ford and musician-designers Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams were all creative polymaths who followed a blueprint forged by Lagerfeld, whom Bolton describes as "a modern-day Warholian god of commerce and communication. ".
What's Your Reaction?
