When Met Gala 2023?

The late Karl Lagerfeld at Met Galas past. Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage

The late Karl Lagerfeld will be the subject of next year’s Met Gala and corresponding Costume Institute exhibition, giving celebrity stylists seven months to scour the globe for the most off-theme, eyebrow-raising, or spooky archival looks (perhaps Kim Kardashian will find another dead person’s dress?). Considering the acclaimed designer’s feelings about fashion in museums, the choice might have taken him by surprise in life and could even rattle him in death. “Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, told Vogue. “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.’” Well, Lagerfeld, the Met begs to differ. His body of work is so influential and substantive — from his own line to his posts at Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, and Chanel — that the museum is putting it on display anyway in “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”

Bolton was inspired to do the exhibition at Lagerfeld’s Paris memorial service in 2019. As people spoke about his love for translating a 2-D design into a 3-D piece, Bolton had an aha moment: Rather than a traditional retrospective (“For one thing, I think Karl would have hated that,” he added), Lagerfeld’s sketches will anchor the exhibition. Hopefully he can send some of these sketches around to the Met Gala guest list come May 1, 2023.