A man who adopted a persona to navigate his way through public life, Karl Lagerfeld was one of the most famous—and most elusive—people on the planet. He continues to be the subject of intense fascination, inspiring the Costume Institute’s much anticipated exhibition “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”
Though not organized biographically, the presence of the designer’s person permeates the exhibition. Entering the show, the visitor passes two dresses in nooks before turning a corner and coming face-to-face with a wall-sized projection of a clip from Loïc Prigent’s video documentation of Lagerfeld sketching. Each stroke made by the designer’s gloved hands on white paper has a sound. Together these gestures and noises form a staccato symphony that is as confident and precise as the designer’s own polished image.
Take a few steps right, though, and the tune—and perspective—changes. There you’ll find one of Lagerfeld’s actual desks (he had four, notes Wendy Yu Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton in the catalog, each “reserved for specific usages: sketching, invoices, business correspondence, and private correspondence”). Strewn with art supplies, and piled high with all sorts of printed matter, this drawing table has a carefully curated deskscape. The books (on subjects like Constructivism, Aubrey Beardsley, Indian jewelry), Bolton explains, were carefully selected from the designer’s own library and refer to specific themes that are addressed in the exhibition. Adjacent to the desk is one of the designer’s custom dressing gowns and a pair of his monogrammed shoes.
The change of scale from outsized to human-sized, and of venue, professional (the 7L studio) to personal, right at the get-go, hints at the explicit and existential queries posed in the exhibition, namely: How do you go about understanding someone? And is it really possible to ever know another person?
Bolton is confident that we can access the essential truths about another human: “I think you can know someone through their working methodology,” he said on a walkthrough yesterday. And what better way to get to know a workaholic (which Lagerfeld was), than through their output? Things become trickier when trying to detangle the work from its creator, though. “I don’t believe you can separate the man from the work,” notes Bolton continues, “but who was that man?”
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