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karl lagerfeld: a line of beauty
As this year’s MET Gala fast approaches on May 1st, 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveils new insights into ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,’ the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute, announcing Tadao Ando as exhibition designer. The show will trace an immersive journey through the late designer’s prolific career — designing for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label — and showcase iconic collections from the 1950s until his passing in 2019.
From May 5th to July 16th, 2023, visitors can expect an intimate glimpse into Lagerfeld’s intricate creative processes and cherished partnerships with ‘premières d’atelier,’ the seamstresses who brought his visions to life. Among the 150 garments on display, a major portion will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s original sketches, providing a unique and comprehensive understanding of the legendary designer’s artistic legacy.
Karl Lagerfeld | image courtesy Chanel
tadao ando announced exhibition designer
The MET has announced that its Karl Lagerfeld exhibition will be designed by Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who first met the designer in 1996. The two had collaborated at that time on an unrealized design studio in Biarritz, France. The architect’s 1993-built Vitra House, his first building outside Japan, even became an artistic subject for Lagerfeld during his explorations in architecture photography.
Tadao Ando has designed an exhibition with a theoretical framework inspired by William Hogarth’s book The Analysis of Beauty. The 18th century essay theorizes that art and aesthetics center around the conceptual ‘line of beauty,’ or the ‘serpentine line’ — an S-shaped curve which represents liveliness and movement, contrasting a straight line which depicts stillness and inactivity. Karl Lagerfeld was known to have been inspired by these writings, drawing from both the straight and serpentine line equally.
Architect Tadao Ando has conceptualized the Costume Institute exhibition to exemplify the intersection of the straight and serpentine lines. The space will thus take shape as a physical manifestation of Karl Lagerfeld’s dynamic creativity.
Tadao Ando | image by Kinji Kanno, courtesy Tadao Ando Architect & Associates
the serpentine layout
The exhibition, which is structured as a thematic and conceptual essay on Lagerfeld’s work instead of a conventional retrospective, will commence with galleries that delve into Lagerfeld’s initial career milestones. These include receiving the International Woolmark Prize in 1954 and his subsequent positions as a design assistant at Balmain and an artistic director at Patou, where he further honed his distinct sketching style.
Sketching was not only Lagerfeld’s main form of artistic expression but also his primary means of communication. Demonstrating its importance to his creative process, another introductory gallery will be dedicated to the premières d’atelier, the ‘architects of Lagerfeld’s vision,’ who transformed his two-dimensional sketches into three-dimensional clothing. To highlight this creative partnership, a series of on-camera interviews will be conducted by French filmmaker Loïc Prigent, who tracked and documented the late designer’s collections from 1997 to 2019, featuring premières from Chanel, Chloé, Fendi, and Lagerfeld’s own brand.
image from Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty teaser
The following sections of the exhibition will be centered around two core themes that embody Lagerfeld’s sketches’ conceptual expressions: the serpentine line and the straight line. These lines symbolize contrasting yet harmonious elements in his work. The serpentine line represents Lagerfeld’s historicist, romantic, and decorative inclinations, while the straight line signifies his modernist, classicist, and minimalist leanings.
The two lines will be subdivided into nine ‘sublines,’ each displaying aesthetic and conceptual contrasts evident in his designs for Chanel, Chloé, Fendi, and Karl Lagerfeld: feminine versus masculine, romantic versus military, rococo versus classical, historical versus futuristic, ornamental versus structural, canonical versus countercultural, artisanal versus mechanical, floral versus geometric, and figurative versus abstract. Connecting these dualities will be figurative ‘explosions’ — garments that symbolize instances of merging, where the conflicting aesthetics of these opposing dichotomies come together and harmonize.
The exhibition will end with a satirical line consisting of two parts: the first part will showcase garments that convey Lagerfeld’s keen intelligence through ironic, playful, and fanciful embroideries; the second will display ensembles reflecting the late designer’s self-perception through different portrayals of his iconic black-and-white ‘uniform.’
project info:
exhibition title: Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty
location: Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)
exhibition designer: Tadao Ando
on view: May 5th — July 16th, 2023
