On coming into “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” on the Met final yr, I used to be at first decreased to nouns and adjectives. I used to be overcome with description.
An ensemble of an overdress and underdress for Chanel Autumn/Winter 2002–2003. The overdress, in a darkish grey cashmere knit, is as formally cinched as a go well with jacket. The underdress is constructed from a lighter grey silk satin with ivory, beige, and grey silk tulle and embroidered with iridescent gold, pink, grey, black, and white bugle beads and sequins. The explanation for this sequence of blandly materials phrases from the exhibition label is that I’ve no different approach of describing what I used to be taking a look at: the sensual and supernatural approach the underdress pooled in a rippled silver circle across the wearer’s ft, contrasting so fantastically with the meticulously sober overdress.
Beside it, a zipped black jacket with stitched pink ellipses for Lagerfeld’s personal label, constructed from what was possibly scuba materials, with a miniature elongation to the left sleeve, a little bit flap, to maintain a metro ticket in.
An “Atys” ensemble from Chanel A/W 1987–1988, named after the opera by Lully. The jacket is sort of a doublet in blue and white silk satin, embroidered not simply with gold sequins, gold and white beads, and gold and blue silk thread but in addition blue and white camellias. The seventeenth century of Lully’s royal opera mirrored through Serge Lifar because the eighteenth-century dancer Auguste Vestris in a dressing up by Chanel—the underside of the jacket flaring out so it seems like a shorn-off farthingale.
Lagerfeld appeared to love this concept of shrinkage to create surprising shapes. In a black and white silk satin costume from Chanel A/W 1991–1992, the form of engulfing guardainfante worn by the miniature princess in Velázquez’s Las Meninas has been splendidly shrunk to above the knee whereas sustaining its outstretched type, which floats in a seemingly inconceivable circle round its wearer.
For a second I turned drenched in longing. To have seen these garments on precise people! To have seen these supplies transfer, at nightclubs and penthouse events! Had I ever been in such circles? I felt acutely that I had not. There was a somber melancholy, shifting amongst these mannequins and their motionless arms, as if these garments didn’t need to be checked out so inquisitively. They wished to carry out. Maybe writing on style, I believed, wants a extra fictional mode, one thing like these medieval narratives of statues that begin to purchase their very own animation.
However step by step this demonic sensual pleasure relaxed into one thing extra like pondering. With Lagerfeld, it appears, there have been all the time two registers at play: the register of reference and the register of method. A jacket and trousers from Chanel Spring/Summer season 1985, as an illustration, is pure Watteau Pierrot, in cream silk crepe de Chine and silk chiffon. It has Pierrot’s buttons and ruffle sleeves and pleated collar, however you then understand that what makes it an enchancment on Pierrot’s outfit is the best way the pleats aren’t gently molded however are mechanically exact, and aren’t allowed to sit down within the common form however are folded in waves across the neck, a papery extravagance.
Elsewhere there have been imitations of crazed exuberance: in a Chanel ensemble from S/S 1993, over a pink silk crinkle chiffon slip is a costume of clear plastic, painted and embroidered by Maison Lesage with curlicues and vase motifs taken from the Lyon silk hangings and fabric used to brighten the partitions of Marie Antoinette’s billiard room. From Chanel A/W 2010–2011, a costume made from white organza, whose embroidery uncannily and extravagantly imitates the latticework border of a Meissen plate, whereas the bolero over it’s embroidered by Maison Montex with painted Rhodoid flowers, just like the multicolored sprays painted on the plate’s heart. In a roundabout way, due to this fact, a plate has been expanded right into a costume, like some new demonstration of topology revealing a doughnut and a espresso cup to be points of the identical type.
And oh, the flowers! There was a cape made from flattened camellias in pomegranate, their colour and form absolutely a pun on the French phrase grenade, each the explosive and the fruit; and a Chanel marriage ceremony costume from A/W 2005–2006, a matted floor of threeD white silk camellias, made by Maison Lemarié: the artwork of parurier floral—synthetic flowers—at its most lovely and indulgent. A floor undulates to change into a factor, in order that ornament is elevated to the extent of a precept.
In a few of these particulars, I started to suppose, hesitantly, lurked the potential for a idea. However possibly there was no want for a idea in any respect.
The set design for the present, by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, was white and pure, generally like a temple, generally extra like a spa. Curved dividers within the rectangular area created small rooms. A lot of the mannequins have been arrayed in sequences, both in separate niches or in rows on shallow plinths. Specific ensembles got their very own spotlit plinths on the heart of every area. Right here was a spot of logic, it appeared to say: mind in some way transformed into boleros and seed pearls.
The present opened with two staged gestures that appeared meant to argue extra explicitly for this impact. The very first thing you noticed was a recreation of Lagerfeld’s desk, with its piled litter of books and letters and paper, simply because it was as soon as photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Round you the air was electrified by a form of birdsong: the squeaking of felt-tip pens making traces on paper, the soundtrack to a video of Lagerfeld making one in all his infinite collection of sketches.
This was all pensiveness and pondering, in different phrases, and you then turned a nook and have been in an area referred to as Premières d’Atelier: an array of twenty ensembles and attire, organized collectively on two curved plinths, whose making was mentioned in video projections by a few of Lagerfeld’s premières d’atelier—the heads of studio in his numerous couture homes. Lagerfeld favored to ship his premières a steady collection of sketches for them to rework into draft toiles after which finally their last type. “I see in three dimensions and I have a technique that I can put it on paper and the people that I work with can read the sketch as if they see the dress,” he defined. And it might be that the most effective discourse on Lagerfeld is in these interviews with Anita Briey from Chloé and Karl Lagerfeld, Stefania D’Alfonso from Fendi, Olivia Douchez from one in all Chanel’s ateliers flou, and Jacqueline Mercier from one in all Chanel’s ateliers tailleur for extra structured outfits. Briey describes that black jacket in scuba materials:
There’s a seam down the middle again of the jacket, and since the sleeves are lower like a kimono, in a single with the bodice, we’ve got a collection of vertical panels which can be joined collectively. On one facet of the again alone, we are able to rely 4 sample items right here. After we return to the entrance, the lower is simply as difficult. I’d say that advanced cuts have been a part of the vocabulary that outlined the Karl Lagerfeld model. Even the cuts at Chanel didn’t change a lot when Karl took over the jackets—the richness is within the materials. He used so many various coloured yarns and such elegant supplies that there wasn’t a necessity for overly difficult shapes. I feel that Karl had a good time at Karl Lagerfeld working with these flatter supplies that had extra stretch to them.
In putting this double picture of desk and atelier within the spectator’s pondering, the present provided an growth of its bigger argument. The title given to this survey of Lagerfeld’s large output was “A Line of Beauty.” Within the eighteenth century the British artist William Hogarth wrote a superb, mulish treatise, The Evaluation of Magnificence, outlining his idea of the “line of beauty” as one thing serpentine, gothically British, versus the classical, reactionary straight line. Though Hogarth’s print as an example this idea was exhibited adjoining to the recreation of Lagerfeld’s desk and can also be reproduced as an attractive foldout within the lavish catalog, it appears troublesome to see how his eighteenth-century argument towards standard connoisseurs in any approach pertains to the cosmopolitan Lagerfeld, till it seems that the phrase is solely the best way the curator, Andrew Bolton, is making an attempt, not with out panic, to construction this exhibition of Lagerfeld’s manic productiveness:
The serpentine line signifies his historicist, romantic, and ornamental impulses, whereas the straight line signifies his modernist, classicist, and minimalist tendencies. These two traces are divided into 9 “sublines” offered as dualities: female/masculine; romantic/navy; rococo/classical; historic/futuristic; decorative/structural; canonical/countercultural; artisanal/mechanical; floral/geometric; and figurative/summary.
The issue he’s making an attempt to resolve on this comically oxymoronic record of binary oppositions is all the conundrum of Lagerfeld, and it has preoccupied me ever since. Did Lagerfeld have genius? Is style an artwork type? What’s genuine? Did he consider in something? Does it matter? Why are we right here?
To start out once more, due to this fact: What sort of individual might be deduced from these garments? Or possibly extra importantly: What concept of magnificence or type or model would possibly that individual have? As I confronted the contradictory profusion adorning these clean mannequins with their arms held to their sides or folded behind their backs, I didn’t discover it simple to find a solution. Ever since Lagerfeld entered the world of garments, plainly nobody has been fully positive about his authenticity. By the point he died in 2019, he was one of many world’s most well-known designers: his silhouette—with the sun shades and the excessive collar and the eighteenth-century ponytail—so recognizable that it might be printed on H&M T-shirts, and his cat, Choupette, such a star that she had her personal magnificence line with Shu Uemura and her personal private Instagram account. He had countless energy and extravagance, which makes it all of the more unusual how usually the query of his expertise was persistently and awkwardly raised.
Lagerfeld’s profession started in 1954 with the Worldwide Woolmark Prize, whose jury included the designers Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, and Hubert de Givenchy. He received the prize for greatest coat, whereas Yves Saint Laurent received the extra prestigious prize for greatest costume. Their apparently asymmetrical trajectories turned in some way allegorical, most brilliantly described in Alicia Drake’s compulsive account of the period, The Lovely Fall: Style, Genius, and Wonderful Extra in Nineteen Seventies Paris (2006). The place Saint Laurent cultivated the picture of the tortured artist, Lagerfeld most popular an aura of the affectless hit man: a employed gun introduced in to do a job on a label. Finally Saint Laurent arrange his personal couture home. In the meantime Lagerfeld joined Chloé, which was devoted to the brand new type of ready-to-wear. Each of them beloved extravagance, entourages, homes, artwork, and, in a single well-known occasion, the identical man: the reactionary dandy Jacques de Bascher, who mixed an embarrassing snobisme with extra likable passions for narcotics and S-M.
As they grew older, the allegory grew starker. Saint Laurent burned out and moved into museum exhibits and archival shows. Lagerfeld endured in his methodically extravagant manufacturing ethic: the entrepreneur to Saint Laurent’s saint, persevering with to design for Chanel and Fendi till his demise. However on this conventional dichotomy of artwork and cash, or the artist and the stylist, it seems like one thing is lacking, or being missed.
Lagerfeld was born in 1933 in Germany, to haute-bourgeois mother and father: his father made a fortune within the unromantic enterprise of evaporated milk, whereas his mom ran their upscale homes within the Hamburg environs. The story of his life has been instructed so usually that it now varieties a form of fairy story: how he moved from provincial Hamburg to Paris, then received the Woolmark Prize and commenced working for Balmain. After that he designed for different homes, usually concurrently—Chloé, Fendi, and eventually Chanel—whereas additionally creating his personal Karl Lagerfeld model and dealing on tasks for a stunning number of different companies and labels, from the grocery store Monoprix to Max Mara.
The whole lot in his biography got here to be fabricated or embellished by him: a texture of repressions (his mother and father’ equable membership within the Nazi Get together) and innovations. The fantasy biography constructed in interviews had its distinction within the legend of his ferocious work ethic: he was mentioned to wake at 5:00 AM to sketch for 4 hours earlier than doing the rounds of his studios. Together with Saint Laurent—and in addition Kenzo and Alaïa and Claude Montana—he was on the heart of a scene: a little bit Parisian advanced of incestuous ensembles who all went to Le Sept and Le Palace, along with Grace Jones and Andy Warhol and plenty of narcotics, the garments photographed by Man Bourdin and Helmut Newton. The period was summed up by Roland Barthes in Vogue-Hommes in 1978:
Leaning down over the dance ground of Le Palace throbbing with coloured beams and dancing silhouettes, divining round me within the shadow of ranges and of open loges a complete ebullition of younger our bodies busy of their unsuspected circuits, I appeared to acknowledge, transposed to the fashionable, one thing I had learn in Proust: that night on the Opéra, the place the home and the containers type, below the younger Narrator’s impassioned eye, an aquatic milieu, gently illuminated by aigrettes, by glances, by jewels, by faces, by gestures suggestive of these made by undersea deities, amid which sat enthroned the duchess of Guermantes.
What hope for an period when even its semiologist is seduced by its glamour and shares its fevered references? Its concept of stylish was old-school and ancien régime: Proust, but in addition a collage of Fragonard and Watteau and Marie Antoinette, or the court docket of Louis XIV or Ludwig of Bavaria, or the porcelain manufactories of Sèvres and Meissen and the eighteenth-century cult of chinoiserie. Cash was so fervently adored on this world that it appears jejune to notice that when the Socialist president François Mitterrand took workplace in 1981, Lagerfeld instantly moved for tax functions to Monte Carlo. Style—or not less than the model of style that ruled out of Paris within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties—doesn’t care about your disdain or critique. Like capital, style can take something.
These references to aristocracies and energy buildings have been consumed in such a high-speed method that it’s simple to just accept this observe of imitation and citation as one thing pure reasonably than a consciously invented method. It was Antonio Lopez—a style illustrator of impressed profusion and member of Lagerfeld’s authentic entourage—who launched him to the concept of a temper board: a mind-set about inspiration as one thing collaged and free-form. Lagerfeld noticed how fantastically it matched his personal intelligence, a form of pc that decreased all of world historical past to a Rolodex of names, and he made the temper board central to a designer’s method of pondering. However what does it actually imply {that a} costume or a group ought to reference one thing else? In what approach does a reference create that means? There’s a comical second within the catalog to the Met’s exhibition, when Bolton riffs on a Karl Lagerfeld costume from S/S 2004, a white silk crepe costume hand-painted with black alphabetic letters and numbers. On the entrance of the costume the alphabet descends so as—AB/CDE/FGH/IJK—with L simply hidden across the left leg.
For Lagerfeld, style was not the mute, unversed artwork that some critics think about. Relatively, just like the designer himself, it’s literate and clever, able to conveying letters and linguistic type, as his “alphabet” costume loudly and loftily proclaims. Reconciling textile and textual content, the costume additionally tasks a Barthian rhetoric: organized in alphabetical order, the letters KL tackle the burden and import of the designer’s initials—an indication, directly boastful and fetishistic, acknowledged and appreciated by solely probably the most astute and observant of logophiles.
It’s simple to chortle at this try and load a costume with that means—at the concept intelligence would possibly consist within the means to convey letters; or the obvious confusion of Karl Barth and Roland Barthes, even when how Barthes is likely to be related to one thing so simple as alphabetical order is opaque; or the implication that noticing that Okay and L come subsequent to one another within the alphabet would possibly require the very best abilities of commentary, to not point out the truth that within the authentic sketch for the costume Lagerfeld is clearly fearful by the juxtaposition of Okay and L, so {that a} first record of letters jotted down beside the costume’s silhouette runs: “AB/CDE/FGH/ILK.” However I ponder if the try is extra only a misplaced type of pondering.
The concept of the reference that Lagerfeld and others invented in Paris isn’t intertextual; it isn’t literary or a approach of manufacturing that means. As an alternative it removes all density from the world’s historical past. When Saint Laurent in 1965—to take a parallel instance—printed attire with designs taken from summary work by Piet Mondrian, it wasn’t fascinating as a second within the historical past of artwork. It was exceptional as a result of he found {that a} costume and a sequence of Mondrian squares may occupy the identical type. The invention imposed colour and rigor on the concept of the cocktail costume. It didn’t, nonetheless, alter the concept of Mondrian.
All of for this reason making an attempt to decode the Eighties adoration for the eighteenth century, and particularly Lagerfeld’s adoration, is difficult. In his aphorisms in addition to the best way he dressed and the best way he furnished lots of his homes, he aspired to mimic a method he believed matched the character of an eighteenth-century libertine. He favored to hint his love of the interval to his love as a seven-year-old for a print of a nineteenth-century portray by Adolph Menzel exhibiting Voltaire on the court docket of Frederick II, a scene that smuggles a great of mental dialog right into a floor of gorgeously gilded chairs and silverware and one meltingly lovely chandelier. Definitely for Lagerfeld the eighteenth century was extra the curves of chaises à la grecque than A Vindication of the Rights of Lady or Toussaint Louverture or Jacques le fataliste. The eighteenth century he beloved was largely a great of ornament and of correspondingly lavish spending energy. Even his concept of a libertine appeared brittle—the sorts of information about pleasure acquired within the novels and novellas by Crébillon fils or Laclos appear inconceivable for the Lagerfeld model of a dandy, imprisoned in his lack of have an effect on.
One of many persona’s persistent points of interest for him was the way it gave permission for a collection of intermittently acidic aphorisms, as if he have been Chamfort or Lichtenberg, an aphorist detached to such bourgeois progressive causes as feminism or animal rights or the deconstruction of classical concepts of magnificence. Lagerfeld: style’s id! However then, exactly as a result of it’s so desperately peremptory in its concision, the aphorism seems like an oddly defenseless type of language—the expression not of confidence however of vulnerability. And Lagerfeld’s fixed evocation of an imperious eighteenth-century dandy seems like a extra normal resolution to a continuing sequence of anxieties. There was his anxiousness in relation to need, which it appears he hardly allowed himself in bodily type; there was his anxiousness in relation to his mom, who lived with him for a few years till her demise, and whom he then posthumously recreated as a form of Wildean castrating wit, apparently education him via vicious put-downs; after which there was his anxiousness in relation to his expertise, not simply in contrast with rivals like Saint Laurent however with antecedents like Chanel (from whom he borrowed not simply a complete stylistic vocabulary of chains and matelassé stitching but in addition the style for aphorism and reactionary politics). To be a dandy was a approach of eradicating himself from the period whereas so passionately adhering to it.
The garments within the exhibition have been so dazzling of their textures and colours that it took me a little bit time to comprehend that they have been practically all classical fits and attire, with the occasional cape or coat or bolero. The best of magnificence Lagerfeld admired was insistently standard. There’s a full-length jacket he designed for Chanel A/W 1996–1997: a seething gold floor, embroidered by Maison Lesage in a sample impressed by an Orientalist Louis XV cupboard adorned with japanned panels imitating Chinese language coromandel lacquer. It’s lower so near the physique that if somebody wished to put on it they might additionally must put on a specifically designed bodysuit beneath, to regulate the unhappy drawback {that a} physique shouldn’t be a single brushstroke. Olivia Douchez, who labored with him at Chanel, noticed that “Karl had a very specific approach to shaping the waist. He liked the dresses to fit a little high, not really at the natural waistline.” He labored incessantly on the waists and the shoulders and the edges of the ribs as a result of his mannequin was a sort: a single slender line. That was the monotonous line of magnificence from which he couldn’t deviate.
And but there have been many instances, as I walked via the exhibition, when I discovered myself moved in a approach that’s troublesome to overlook. It fantastically positioned reproductions of Lagerfeld’s preliminary sketches beside every ensemble or costume, letting the spectator hint the motion from sketch to last creation. His signal has change into his black-and-white silhouette, however a extra correct image for Lagerfeld can be the clusters of coloured pencils he stored on his desk. His premières all describe the joy of receiving his first sketches, after which the essential transformation that will happen between the primary toile and the ultimate work, which was the choice on supplies. Someplace on this means to play with texture, and particularly the anticipated texture, is the arcanum of Lagerfeld’s real intelligence, a form of sternly witty sensuality.
In his reign at Chanel, Lagerfeld oversaw an accumulation by the home of smaller savoir-faire maisons, that are deservedly listed within the catalog and credited for every outfit: Desrues for costume jewellery and buttons, Lemarié for feathers and synthetic flowers, Michel for hats, Massaro for footwear, Goossens for gold- and silversmithing, Guillet for corsage and synthetic flowers, Atelier Montex and Lanel for embroidery, Causse for gloves, Barrie for cashmere, Lognon for pleating…And it was within the room the place the artisanal was most in focus, the area dedicated to the juxtaposition of Artisanal Line/Mechanical Line, {that a} sure circuit of preoccupations turned illuminated.
There’s a marriage costume from Chanel S/S 2015 whose first drawing by Lagerfeld is a profile view of a lady in headdress and tunic and a costume that flows out in a scribbled practice behind her—a mélange of smudged and looping traces. It’s due to this fact a shock to see what this naked sketch turned: a meadow of three thousand 3D flowers, in organza, Rhodoid, chiffon, and silk, with little factors of rhinestones and iridescent beads, whereas over it’s a tunic, additionally barely current within the sketch however now embroidered with shimmering ivory sequins in a contrasting silver floor. Or, turning the impact inside out, one thing great is also finished with surprising flatness. A Fendi costume from S/S 2009 has a frank precursor in a dressing up Léon Bakst designed for Nijinsky for the ballet Le Spectre de la rose, a form of community of bandaged flat roses. Lagerfeld’s drawing for his up to date model is solely a naked define, with circles for the flowers. However what then occurred within the atelier was that these circles have been remodeled into flattened-out roses, hand painted in white, cream, and pink, then appliquéd to a nude tulle costume—as if an album of pressed flowers has in some way come to life (see illustration above).
It’s troublesome to formulate any normal idea of how Lagerfeld approached supplies. Definitely in his work there’s nothing like a severely modernist fact to them. Many selections are ruled by a love of mimicry or trompe l’oeil, like a Chanel A/W 1996–1997 coat that appears like fur however is constructed from strips of silk tulle, dyed brown and black to resemble mink. It has its reversed twin in a Fendi coat from 2005–2006 that’s made from fur folded into such exactly billowing waves that I felt it needed to be cloth. This love of trickery is partly pure wit, but it surely’s extra a show of virtuosic depth, like a well-known piece from his first Chanel assortment, S/S 1983: Inès de La Fressange walked out in a easy black costume apparently lavishly coated in jewellery, which in reality was constructed from embroidered beads, pearls, and crystals, together with a halter of piled necklaces that was additionally securing the costume due to its plunging again. Or at one other finish of the spectrum, he made a deconstructed jacket with intentionally distressed holes, as if a digital moth had gone to work, a jacket of lightness and fragility however with braiding nearly invisibly sewn alongside the define to maintain it from falling aside. “There are things the human hand can’t do, and there are things the machine can’t do,” he mentioned. “I use both because they are available. I mix the very best of the human with the very best of the machine. It’s the mix that is interesting.”
Availability! It prompted such confusion and malice in a few of his critics who noticed how Lagerfeld avidly took benefit of each alternative, but it surely’s this exploration of the polymorphous potentialities contained in supplies that was the validation of what would possibly too grandly be referred to as his technique. (“My colleagues and I were sometimes [left] speechless by the things that he knew,” noticed one première. “We would say to each other, ‘Gosh, imagine if he had known how to sew.’”) One mind-set about what occurred within the Nineteen Seventies in Paris is to see it as an anguished want for style to change into an artwork. Saint Laurent specifically was lacerated by time—directly determined to be spiritually and commercially synchronized with the current second whereas additionally creating works of everlasting magnificence that might dwell in a museum. That form of double imaginative and prescient had already been demolished by his idol Chanel:
A costume is neither a tragedy, nor a portray; it’s a charming and ephemeral creation, not an eternal murals. Style ought to die and die rapidly, so that commerce could survive…. The extra transient style is the extra good it’s. You’ll be able to’t defend what’s already lifeless.
Lagerfeld the hit man all the time favored to level out that his solely loyalty was to the second. Within the catalog to the Met’s Chanel present in 2005 he wrote, “Fashion is also an attempt to make certain invisible aspects of the reality of the moment visible.” Much less philosophically, however saying the identical factor, he noticed in 1982, “What do I stand for? The reflection of the spirit of the time—whatever season it is. Or more simply, fashion opportunism.” This perspective feels extra likable than Saint Laurent’s obsession with glory. And in a approach it additionally represents Lagerfeld’s deepest connection to the period of the libertines. Crébillon fils wrote a celebrated dramatic dialogue, La Nuit et le second, dedicated to outlining a idea of the second, the concept there can be a fragile however particular second in any interplay with one other individual when seduction was attainable.
However I ponder if one other concept of the second is actually Lagerfeld’s last lesson. For the Chanel S/S 1984 assortment, he made a rapid sketch that appears to indicate a costume merely illustrated with a design from a bit of Chinese language porcelain. After hundreds of hours of labor, the ultimate costume emerges as one thing ecstatically ingenious. It’s made from organza embroidered with a shimmering matted community of blue, white, and clear seed beads and crystals so dense and so easily reflective that it doesn’t simply recreate a design however a complete porcelain floor. You’ll be able to look from the sketch to the costume and again once more, infinitely. What you’re taking a look at is a gift second not of something as boring as a zeitgeist or an period, however the affected person, absorbed current of pure making. And that, maybe, is what Lagerfeld actually understood by magnificence.
