The Metropolitan Museum of Art has shared more details about The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.
The show will spotlight Lagerfeld’s unique working methodology, focusing on the late designer’s stylistic vocabulary as it was expressed in through lines, aesthetic and conceptual themes that appear time and again, in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019. More than 150 garments will be on display, and Lagerfeld’s sketches will accompany most of the pieces, underscoring his complex creative process and collaborative relationships with his premières d’atelier. Presented at The Met Fifth Avenue in The Tisch Galleries, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty will be on view from May 5 through July 16, 2023.
The Costume Institute Benefit (also known as The Met Gala) will take place on Monday, May 1, 2023. Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer, Dua Lipa, and Anna Wintour will serve as co-chairs for the event, which provides The Costume Institute with its primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, operations, and capital improvements.
Support for the exhibition and this year’s Met Gala is being provided by Chanel. Major support is also provided by Fendi, where the designer also worked for more than 50 years. Additional funding is offered by Karl Lagerfeld and Condé Nast.
Sketching was both Lagerfeld’s primary mode of creative expression and his primary mode of communication. Illustrating its significance to the designer’s creative practice, another introductory gallery will be dedicated to the premières d’atelier, the seamstresses regarded as the architects of Lagerfeld’s vision, responsible for translating his two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments. Shedding light on this creative collaboration will be a series of on-camera interviews, conducted by French filmmaker Loïc Prigent, who followed and documented the late designer’s collections from 1997 to 2019, featuring premières from Chanel, Chloé, Fendi, and Lagerfeld’s eponymous label.
The exhibition was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, who first met Lagerfeld in 1996. Presented as a thematic and conceptual essay about Lagerfeld’s work, rather than a traditional retrospective, the show will open with introductory galleries that explore Lagerfeld’s early career, including being awarded the International Woolmark Prize in 1954 and his ensuing roles as a design assistant at Balmain and an artistic director of Patou, where he continued to refine his unique style of sketching.
“The exhibition will explore Lagerfeld’s complex working methodology, tracing the evolution of his fashions from the two dimensional to the three dimensional," said Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu curator in charge, The Costume Institute. "The fluid lines of his sketches found expression in recurring themes in his fashions, uniting his designs for Chanel, Chloé, Fendi, his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, and Patou, creating a diverse and prolific body of work unparalleled in the history of fashion.”
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