- Vogue announced the 2023 Met Gala theme on Friday.
- The "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty" gala will honor the late designer.
The 2023 Met Gala will honor Karl Lagerfeld.
On Friday, Vogue announced the theme of the 2023 Met Gala, which will take place on May 1, 2023, the first Monday in May.
The theme is "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty," and it will pay tribute to the designer's body of work.
Lagerfeld died in 2019 at 85 years old. The late designer was best known for his work as Chanel's creative director, but he also worked with Fendi, Balmain, and for his self-named brand, as Vogue reported.
Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum, told Vogue that Lagerfeld wasn't interested in having his work in a museum when he was alive.
"Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum," he said. "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.'"
Bolton also told Vogue that instead of doing a "traditional retrospective" on Lagerfeld's most famous works, the exhibit will be based on his sketches.
"He would sketch everything," Bolton said to Vogue of Lagerfeld. "He would always say that he could draw before he could talk or walk. In many ways, it was his primary form of communication, whether he was delivering them by fax machine or iPhone. So at its heart, the exhibition will look at the evolution of Karl's two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments."
"And what's fascinating to have discovered: I always thought that his drawings were very spontaneous and almost impressionistic. But they were in truth extremely precise, almost mathematical," Bolton went on to tell Vogue. "We couldn't see it because we are not trained, but his premiers knew down to the millimeter what each line meant. It was almost a secret code, a language shared between him and those premiers, that only they could fully decipher."
Although the Met Gala sometimes has a broader theme, like "In America: An Anthology of Fashion," it's not unusual for the star-studded event to honor a specific designer, such as the 2011 gala that paid tribute to Alexander McQueen,