(New York, January 18, 2023)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today the co-chairs for The Costume Institute Benefit on May 1, 2023, in New York.
Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer, Dua Lipa, and Anna Wintour will serve as the evening’s co-chairs. The dress code for the event will be “In honor of Karl.”
The Benefit (also known as The Met Gala®) takes place annually on the first Monday in May and marks the opening of The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition—this year, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty—and provides the department with its primary source of funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, operations, and capital improvements.
The exhibition and the Benefit for The Costume Institute are made possible by CHANEL.
Major support is provided by FENDI.
Additional funding is provided by KARL LAGERFELD and Condé Nast.
Exhibition Overview
Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty will explore the German designer’s stylistic vocabulary as it was expressed in through lines—aesthetic themes that appear time and again—in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019 and spotlight his unique working methodology.
Approximately 150 pieces will be on view, spanning Lagerfeld’s career as the creative director of Chanel, Chloé, Fendi, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, as well as his time at Balmain and Patou. Many of the objects will be accompanied by the designer’s sketches, which underscore his complex creative process and trace the evolution of his fashions from two-dimensional drawings to three-dimensional garments realized through the collaborative relationships with his premières.
Drawing on the theory of art and aesthetics expressed by William Hogarth as the “line of beauty,” the exhibition is anchored by two lines: the “straight line” and the “serpentine line,” which delineate, respectively, Lagerfeld’s modernist and historicist tendencies. These lines explore different stylistic representations of themes that the designer returned to again and again, spreading in a rhizome-like configuration with intersecting moments—or “explosions”—that exemplify points of convergence. The exhibition will conclude with the “satirical line,” a section that focuses on Lagerfeld’s ironic, playful, and whimsical predilections expressed through visual puns that reflect the designer’s razorsharp wit.
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January 18, 2023
Contact: Alex Fixer, Mika Kiyono
Communications@metmuseum.org
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