Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty Will Be the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Spring 2023 Costume Institute Exhibition

Karl Lagerfeld was a regular attendee at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, from the Seventh on Sale Benefit in 1991 to Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in 2011—and of course for the Chanel exhibition in 2005. And yet, says the Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, Andrew Bolton: “Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum. When we worked on the Chanel show together he was incredibly generous in what he lent, but he was completely disinterested in the exhibition itself! He would say ‘fashion is not art—fashion belongs on the street, on women’s bodies, on men’s bodies.’”

From 1954 (when he shared the Woolmark Prize with another emerging designer named Yves Saint Laurent) until his death in 2019, Lagerfeld produced a body of work—for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his own eponymous brand—that is unparalleled. Which is why—despite what Lagerfeld himself thought about fashion’s place in a museum—he is to be the subject of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Spring 2023 Costume Institute Exhibition.