Karl Lagerfeld, the designer behind your houses Chanel and Fendi, along with his own name label, was absolutely nothing if not a font style of highly held viewpoints. The things he liked—the principle of “fun fur”; fingerless driving gloves; cold Diet Coke; white poplin Hilditch & Key gown t-shirts; routine suppers at Le Comptoir des Saints-Pères, in Paris; his creamy-white tortie-Birman cat, Choupette; abundant flower themes; extremely structured garments garnished with classic lace, golden brocade, easy bows, or a lagniappe of pearls made with Gripoix glass—made him a household name as a dogmatic doyen of haute couture and among its most steadfast and inevitable characters. The things he did not like, and which he was continuously griping about, varied from the quotidian (open-toed shoes, selfies, New Year’s Eve, phone conversation, manicures, the nineteen-nineties, sweatpants, suspenders) to the grossly questionable. In the years prior to his death, in 2019, he openly slammed the #MeToo motion, called the vocalist Adele “a little too fat,” and invoked the Holocaust to express his distaste for Angela Merkel’s open-door policies towards migrants. His very popular book “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet” motivated readers to take in as low as 8 hundred calories daily in pursuit of the severe thinness that he considered a non-negotiable virtue.
The designer’s tough tradition made headlines in the lead-up to Monday night’s Met Gala, the yearly fashion-world fund-raiser that this year marked the opening of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute exhibit entitled “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” But at the occasion itself the red-carpet phenomenon recommended little sense of uncertainty or vital range from all that Lagerfeld represented. The night rather included a gregarious parade of reverent tributes, consisting of archival Lagerfeld pieces—Nicole Kidman recycled the ballet-pink haute-couture Chanel dress that Lagerfeld created for her to use in a 2004 Chanel No. 5 commercial; the vocalist Dua Lipa appeared in a cream tweed bodice dress from a collection that Lagerfeld created for Chanel in 1992—and referential appearances from other designers, which nodded acutely in their usage of silver-toned gems, Oreo-cookie colors, puffy material rosettes, plumes, black leather, and night gloves to Lagerfeld’s persnickety predispositions.
Some of the Lagerfeldiana on display screen was rather actual. The star Jeremy Pope showed up using a thirty-foot cape with Lagerfeld’s face on it, which needed 5 individuals to carry it along, and the Met Gala’s resident scamp, Jared Leto, was concealed inside an upsetting full-body outfit of Choupette the cat, total with huge cushioned paws and a floor-scraping tail. Choupette was, in reality, sliding all over the gala carpet; possibly leaning into Lagerfeld’s cat fancying kept visitors in safe and straightforward area. The “S.N.L.” star Chloe Fineman brought a bejewelled cat handbag, while the rap artist Doja Cat made herself lynx-like with making use of facial prosthetics. The artist Lil Nas X had the most outrageous feline appearance of the celebration, including an elaborate mask decorated with flashing hairs, and very little else. Mostly naked save for a teensy sparkly thong, he was covered in metal paint, diamond dust, and roaming pearls, instilling the celebrations with some welcome humor and eroticism. When a press reporter asked him a concern, he reacted with “Meow.”
Outside of the clowder of feline getups, the night was, for the many part, a controlled taking place. Sure, there were the requisite hyperbolic trains (Glenn Close’s Erdem dress had a hem that almost covered the staircase; Jennifer Lopez’s vampish Ralph Lauren number cut thick, Sharpie-esque lines behind her) and overstated percentages (a pregnant Rihanna was cumulus-chic in a torso-swallowing, head-swaddling white Maison Valentino gown; Florence Pugh used a feathered headpiece over her recently shaved head, including a minimum of a foot to her height). But, over all, the stars never ever diverted too far from the task. They used black and white and ivory and shell pink (Lagerfeld’s favorites). They used the sort of costly yet downplayed diamonds that Lagerfeld chosen. They used a great deal of interlocking “C” devices, which ended up being the ultimate status sign throughout Lagerfeld’s period at Chanel.
On the scene this year, for The New Yorker, was the illustrator Sarula Bao, sketching participants live as they climbed up the museum’s actions. Bao, who most just recently drew the candy-colored cover for the publication’s Spring Style & Design Issue, invested her youth in Cape Cod imagining ending up being a designer herself, and went to RISD for haute couture. She turned rather to a profession in illustration after discovering that, as she puts it, “basically, I couldn’t stop drawing cartoons.” At the gala, she staked out an area near the entryway and caught the most remarkable appearances utilizing a digital sketch pad and a stylus. Her preferred, she said later, was Janelle Monáe’s matryoshka-reminiscent Thom Browne outfit, which included Monáe gradually unpeeling a customized attire to reveal a clear black transparent hoop skirt beneath. “It was so Chanel and so Lagerfeld,” Bao said. “So much of what he did was upping what Chanel had done, pushing that brand based on what had already come before. It’s really nice to see something that comes after and is still pushing it to the next level.”
Bao’s illustrations from the gala are listed below, consisting of one from the very end of the night, when a paparazzi-friendly cockroach chose to skitter up the stairs towards the museum, as observers stood waiting for Rihanna’s extremely fashionably late arrival. It was a pointer that, behind all the glamour of style’s greatest night, there is constantly a less than attractive scramble. Lagerfeld would certainly have actually disliked it. ♦
