Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty at the MET

4 mai 2023

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty at the MET

Composite Image, 2023. Photographed by Julia Hetta. Photo © Julia Hetta

NEW YORK - The Costume Institute’s spring 2023 exhibition will examine the work of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019). Focusing on the designer’s stylistic vocabulary as expressed in aesthetic themes that appear time and again in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019, the show will spotlight the German-born designer’s unique working methodology. Most of the approximately 150 pieces on display will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s sketches, which underscore his complex creative process and the collaborative relationships with his premières, or head seamstresses. Lagerfeld’s fluid lines united his designs for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, creating a diverse and prolific body of work unparalleled in the history of fashion.

“Fashion does not belong in a museum.”

The career of Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933–2019) spanned a remarkable and incomparable sixty-five years, during which he served as the creative director of multiple design houses, including Fendi, Chloé, Chanel, and his eponymous label. Approaching fashion as both an art and a business, he created the identity of the fashion designer-impresario that has become the blueprint for contemporary designers.

While Lagerfeld the man has long been the subject of breathless mythologizing and hagiography, this exhibition focuses on Lagerfeld the designer, specifically his unique practice of sketching. Other designers draw as part of their creative process, but usually as a means to an end. For Lagerfeld, who combined detailed technical drawing with expressive fashion illustration, creating a sketch was an end in and of itself.

Karl Lagerfeld, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue in 2018. Photo: Annie Leibovitz/Vogue /Trunk Archive; courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tracing the evolution of Lagerfeld’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments, the exhibition is anchored by two lines: the “serpentine” line, signifying his historicist, romantic, and decorative impulses, and the “straight” line, representing his modernist, classicist, and minimalist tendencies. Dualities represented by these two lines are explored in the central galleries, each of which has an elevated pedestal with a garment that attempts to resolve and reconcile the competing aesthetics of these dichotomies.

The theoretical framework for the exhibition is inspired by seventeenth-century British artist William Hogarth’s concept of the “line of beauty,” an S-shaped line that represents liveliness and movement, in contrast to a straight line, which denotes stillness, inactivity, and even death. Lagerfeld, however, was much too magnanimous to maintain such aesthetic judgments—for him, the serpentine and the straight line were both beautiful and exciting, engaging his imagination in equal measure.

Sketching was not only Lagerfeld’s primary mode of creative expression but also his primary mode of communication. To the untrained eye, his sketches seem spontaneous and expressionistic. But to the discerning eyes of his premières d’atelier, who were responsible for translating Lagerfeld’s drawings into finished garments, they convey precise details and almost mathematical instructions. The sketches function as kind of a secret language between the designer and his collaborators, who knew exactly how to decipher every line, mark, and notation.

The premières featured in the videos in this gallery had long-established working relationships with Lagerfeld: Anita Briey, formerly of Chloé and Lagerfeld’s eponymous label; Stefania D’Alfonso of Fendi; Olivia Douchez of one of Chanel’s ateliers flou; and Jacqueline Mercier, formerly of one of Chanel’s ateliers tailleur. The interviews were conducted by the French filmmaker Loïc Prigent, who has followed and documented Lagerfeld’s collections since 1997. Providing valuable insight into the designer’s creative process and working methodology, each première discusses how she decoded Lagerfeld’s drawings to transform them into pieces featured in the gallery.

Lagerfeld was keenly aware that his reliance on the premières, whom he regarded as the architects of his vision, was reciprocal. As he explained, “When someone in the atelier has a difficult time making up one of my designs, even though I have never sewn, it is up to me to find the solution in three seconds. Otherwise, you completely lose respect in the eyes of the premières d’atelier.”

ORNAMENTAL LINE / STRUCTURAL LINE

Lagerfeld was a consummate connoisseur. His collecting practices were as eclectic as his fashion inspirations and encompassed styles ranging from Art Deco to Memphis, Biedermeier to the Wiener Werkstätte. The designer’s greatest affinity, however, was for the arts of the eighteenth century, specifically the style of Louis XV, which he regarded as the epitome of elegance and restraint. This interest spilled over into his fashions, evident in the garments in the serpentine ornamental line, which were inspired by a diverse range of eighteenth-century decorative arts, including Jean-Baptiste Pillement’s etchings, a Meissen plate with a pierced border, Vincennes porcelain flowers, a blue-and-white lacquered corner cabinet, and a Chinese blue-and-white porcelain vase from the Qing dynasty.

In contrast to the rococo flourishes of the ornamental line, the structural line reveals a modernist exactitude expressed through Lagerfeld’s approach to tailoring. Featuring a series of suits and coats from his Chanel collections, the garments reveal a fundamental difference between the designer and the founder of the house: whereas Gabrielle Chanel was chiefly interested in tailoring finishes, Lagerfeld was more concerned with tailoring construction. The fashions also highlight two of the designer’s anatomical obsessions: the shoulders and the side of the ribs—specifically the serratus anterior, also known as the boxer’s muscle or, as Lagerfeld referred to it, the “chute du foie,” which literally translates to the “fall of the liver.”

ORNAMENTAL LINE

Dress, House of CHANEL (French, founded 1910), Spring-Summer 2019 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris. Photo © Julia Hetta

Sketch of CHANEL dress, Spring-Summer 2019 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris.

Runway image of CHANEL dress, Spring-Summer 2019 Haute Couture. Photo: Victor Boyko / Getty Images

STRUCTURAL LINE

Coat, House of CHANEL (French, founded 1910), Fall-Winter 2017/18 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris. © Julia Hetta

Sketch of CHANEL coat, Fall-Winter 2017/18 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris.

Runway image of CHANEL coat, Fall-Winter 2017/18 Haute Couture. Photo: Peter White / Getty Images

Explosion

Coat, House of CHANEL (French, founded 1910), Fall-Winter 2014/15 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris. Photo © Julia Hetta

Sketch of CHANEL coat, Fall-Winter 2014/15 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris.

Runway image of CHANEL Coat, Fall-Winter 2014/15 Haute Couture. Photo: Dominique Charriau / WireImage/ Getty Images

FLORAL LINE / GEOMETRIC LINE

The floral line focuses on one of the most refined and rarefied of the couture métiers: those dedicated to the production of “parurier floral,” or artificial flowers. For many costume connoisseurs, artificial flowers are emblematic of the triumph of the art of fashion, and for Lagerfeld, they provided a means of simulating nature’s abundant beauty, which he exploited to its full potential by pursuing a seemingly inexhaustible plethora of botanical representations. Reflective of his use of applied decoration more generally, the flowers that bloom on the designer’s garments are not afterthe-fact decorations, but enabling principles.

In stark contrast to the organic three-dimensionality of the floral line, the geometric line includes ensembles that celebrate economy of line and two-dimensional planes. The graphic forms that appear on many of the pieces are indebted to a range of modern art movements, including Cubism, Orphism, and Constructivism. Pop Art was the inspiration for the “Alphabet” dress from the spring/summer 2004 collection of Lagerfeld’s eponymous label, which is hand painted with letters and numbers rendered in Futura, a sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. Based on simple geometric shapes—near-perfect circles, squares, and triangles— that channel the modernity of the Bauhaus, the font epitomizes the minimalist aesthetic that underlines this grouping of garments.

Floral Line

Wedding dress, House of CHANEL (French, founded 1910), Fall-Winter 2005/06 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris. Photo © Julia Hetta

Sketch of CHANEL wedding dress, Fall-Winter 2005/06 Haute Couture; Courtesy Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris.

Runway image of CHANEL wedding dress, Fall-Winter 2005/06 Haute Couture. Photo: Giovanni Giannoni / WWD / Penske Media via Getty Images

Geometric Line

Dress, FENDI (Italian, founded 1925), spring/summer 1997; Courtesy FENDI. Photo © Julia Hetta.

Sketch of FENDI dress, spring/summer 1997; Courtesy FENDI.

Runway image of FENDI dress, spring/summer 1997. Photo: Davide Maestri / WWD / Penske Media via Getty Images

FIGURATIVE LINE / ABSTRACT LINE

Lagerfeld felt strongly that fashion was a form of selfexpression that reflected the artistic and cultural zeitgeist. He was adamant, however, that fashion was not art and that fashion designers were not artists. For Lagerfeld, fashion was irrevocably practical and commercial, comprising a system and a culture that were radically different from those of art. However, he often looked to fine art for both inspiration and information. As the figurative and abstract lines demonstrate, the designer connected art and fashion through both the narrative and non-narrative and the representational and non-representational.

Lagerfeld’s figurative tendencies were most fully expressed in his designs for Chloé and Fendi, such as for the lyrical autumn/winter 2016–17 haute fourrure collection for the latter, which was inspired by Kay Nielsen’s illustrations for the 1914 book East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and for which he commissioned illustrations by Kate Baylay and Charlotte Gastaut. His designs for Chloé often drew upon Art Deco and Art Nouveau references, as in the dress from his autumn/winter 1967–68 collection that features an image inspired by British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley that was hand painted by Nicole Lefort. The French artist’s work also appears on several of the dresses in the abstract line, which expands on and develops the artistic influences seen in the previous gallery’s geometric line, with additional references to Cubism and Constructivism—art movements that held a particular fascination for Lagerfeld because, like the designer himself, their abstractions were open-minded and magnanimous.

Figurative Line

“Rachmaninoff” dress, CHLOÉ (French, founded 1952), spring/summer 1973; Courtesy CHLOÉ. Photo © Julia Hetta

Sketch of CHLOÉ “Rachmaninoff” dress, spring/summer 1973; Courtesy CHLOÉ.

Abstract Line

Sketch of FENDI coat, fall/winter 2000–2001; Courtesy FENDI.

THE SATIRICAL LINE

Lagerfeld took inspiration from the eighteenth century not only for his couture and collecting practices but also for his own persona, which was modeled less on aristocratic and gentlemanly archetypes and more on the Enlightenment’s definition of wit, both as an abstract concept and as a form of behavior. In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson outlined several characteristics of wit, including novelty, imagination, judgment, and knowledge, all of which Lagerfeld embodied and reflected in his fashions. These elements appear in all the preceding galleries, but perhaps nowhere more audaciously than in the satirical line, where they are expressed in Surrealist visual epigrams rendered in lavish embroideries.

One of Lagerfeld’s preferred Surrealist practices was trompe l’oeil, which elided the boundaries between the real and the imagined, perception and deception, as is demonstrated in the handbag embroidered on the Chanel dress and the sheath dress suspended from a clothes hanger on the Chloé dress. Another favored technique was the democratic embrace of the commonplace, as seen in his “lightbulb” and “shower” dresses for Chloé and the “candlestick” dresses for his eponymous label—tongue-in-cheek (mis) appropriations of vernacular objects that revel in humorous displacements as well as disruptions of scale, status, and association. Through boldly inventive and beautifully executed embroideries, Lagerfeld converts the everyday into the exceptional, reconciling the ordinary and the extraordinary, the unremarkable and the remarkable.

Satirical Line