take a first look inside 'karl lagerfeld: a line of beauty' ahead of tonight's MET gala

the met honors karl lagerfeld

Ahead of the highly anticipated MET gala, held this year on May 1st, 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens its doors for an exclusive preview of the spring exhibition ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,’ at its Costume Institute. With exhibition design by beloved architect Tadao Ando, the show will trace an immersive journey through the late fashion 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. designboom steps inside ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ to offer a first look at the stunning works.

exhibition view | image © designboom

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 are accompanied by Lagerfeld’s original sketches, providing a unique and comprehensive understanding of the legendary designer’s artistic legacy. 

exhibition view | image © designboom

tadao ando: exhibition designer

‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ will open at the MET with exhibition design by Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who first met the fashion 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.

exhibition view | image © designboom

Tadao Ando designs the exhibition with a theoretical framework inspired by William Hogarth’s book The Analysis of Beauty. The eighteenth-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 conceptualizes the Costume Institute exhibition to exemplify the intersection of the straight and serpentine lines. The space thus takes shape as a physical manifestation of Karl Lagerfeld’s dynamic creativity.

exhibition view | image © designboom

the serpentine layout

The exhibition, which is structured as a thematic and conceptual essay on Lagerfeld’s work instead of a conventional retrospective, commences with galleries that delve into Lagerfeld’s initial career milestones. These include his receiving of 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 have been 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.

exhibition view | image © designboom

The following sections of the exhibition are 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 are 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.

exhibition view | image © designboom

The exhibition concludes with a satirical line consisting of two parts: the first part showcases garments that convey Lagerfeld’s keen intelligence through ironic, playful, and fanciful embroideries; the second displays ensembles reflecting the late designer’s self-perception through different portrayals of his iconic black-and-white ‘uniform.’

1/9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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