At the Met Gala, an ode to Karl Lagerfeld — and his cat

On Friday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open to the public a major Karl Lagerfeld exhibition, featuring around 150 garments from the late Chanel designer’s 65-year career in fashion. Last night, however, another Lagerfeld retrospective took place on the steps of the museum, as celebrities, supermodels and designers swanned up the creamy beige carpet and into the annual Met Gala wearing a parade of black and white designs.

The dress code for the night? “In honour of Karl.”

Technically a fundraiser for the Met’s Costume Institute, the department that stages the museum’s popular fashion exhibitions, the Met Gala has over the years transformed into the fashion world’s Super Bowl. It’s a magnet for big-name actors, musicians, politicians and influencers — and a prime advertising opportunity for brands — thanks in large part to the organising efforts of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who has overseen the Met Gala since 1995.

At the Met Gala, it’s usually the most show-stopping or conversation-starting outfit that wins the night. There were several surreal garments this time around, including three that paid homage to Lagerfeld’s blue-eyed Birman cat, Choupette. Doja Cat, who previously covered herself in red crystals for a Schiaparelli fashion show, teamed catlike face prosthetics with her sparkling Oscar de la Renta dress, which also had a hood with cat ears. Lil Nas X worked with make-up artist Pat McGrath to create a feline look from silver body paint, pearls and crystals. And Jared Leto, who once carried a replica of his own head to the Met Gala, arrived in a fluffy cat costume, like a bizarre mascot for the fashion industry.

For the most part, however, this year’s Met Gala seemed less like a competition and more like an earnest tribute to Lagerfeld, who died in 2019. There are few figures in fashion as titanic as Lagerfeld, who is best known for transforming Chanel, where he became creative director in 1983, into a modern luxury powerhouse. (He also designed for Patou, Chloé, Fendi and his own line.) Attendees gave themselves over to the designer’s favourite motifs — black and white, camellias, black bows, strings of pearls, chains — without seeming to worry whether they were wearing the same look as someone else. They did look alike for the most part, but that was the point.

Some were dressed like Lagerfeld. The designer was famous for his uniform of black jacket, white shirt with high collar, fingerless leather gloves and sunglasses. In a buttoned-up jacket and low-slung skirt, singer Teyana Taylor served a cheeky riff on the look. The designer Tommy Hilfiger arrived wearing a suit made of a vintage Chanel fabric and a white shirt that was a gift from Lagerfeld. Lagerfeld must have had a valet to help him dress, Hilfiger noted to an interviewer: the shirt buttons at the back, and the collar attaches separately.

William Middleton, author of the recent Lagerfeld biography Paradise Now, tells me that the designer never wanted to look back at his own archive: “He always said, ‘Oh, I never want to look to the past.’ And yet no one knew more about history than Karl.” Lagerfeld might have been pleased, then, to see that the tributes to his designs were often as clever as they were admiring. Anne Hathaway arrived in a supremely glamorous Versace gown that reinterpreted the Italian house’s famous safety-pin dress — you know, the slinky number that Elizabeth Hurley wore to the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 — through the lens of Lagerfeld’s Chanel. This time, the dress was made of bone-white tweed, the gold safety pins adorned with big pearls.

Indeed, it was a treat for fashion fans to see contemporary designers mix their codes with Lagerfeld’s. Michaela Coel wore a heavily embroidered Schiaparelli gown that featured an array of chains and pearls, as well as the gold metalwork for which the brand’s current designer, Daniel Roseberry, is known. For Jenna Ortega, designer Thom Browne concocted a prim collared dress with an off-kilter skirt and a suit jacket cropped to the rib cage, all of it festooned with chains and pearls. The Wednesday actor looked, in a great way, like a Chanel doll that had gone through the shredder.

To a certain degree, the evening solidified the mythology that surrounded Lagerfeld, which the designer encouraged with his stark daily uniform. “He said, ‘I’m a puppet. I spend an hour in the morning putting the puppet together,’” Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge at the Costume Institute, tells me. “It was deliberate, I feel. By having something that was so iconic, it made him less accessible. It iconized him, but it was protection for who he really was.”

For the Met’s new Lagerfeld exhibition, Bolton says that he aimed to avoid Lagerfeld’s image as much as possible, focusing instead on his designs. “You get a better sense of who he is through his work, rather than his uniform,” Bolton says. He framed the show around the designer’s sketches, which were both expressive fashion illustrations and detailed technical drawings. Sketches were how Lagerfeld communicated, Bolton says: even during fittings, he would draw the adjustments he wanted.

Lagerfeld’s own creations did appear at the Met Gala, which had been preceded by a frenzy of competition for vintage Lagerfeld designs. Dua Lipa looked like a tweed Cinderella in a 1992 Chanel haute couture gown, while Penélope Cruz floated up the steps in a sparkling hooded dress from Chanel’s spring/summer 1988 couture collection. (Both were co-chairs of the event alongside Wintour, Coel and Roger Federer.) Kristen Stewart, like Cruz a longtime Chanel ambassador, wore a suit from Chanel’s 2017 resort show.

These not-new looks weren’t the loudest, but they were in many ways the most winning, simply because of their connection to Lagerfeld. Consider, for instance, Nicole Kidman’s feathered, blush-coloured gown with its ethereal sweeping train. It was stunning, to be sure, but it could easily have been lost in the fray, had it not been for a certain biographical detail. As it turns out, it was the same dress Kidman wore in an advertisement for Chanel No 5 directed by Baz Luhrmann back in 2004. It’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic about that.

‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 5 to July 16