By: JESSICA RHOADES
Staff Writer
On May 1st, 2023, A-list celebrities, fashion world icons, and the art world come together at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala.
Every year on the first Monday of May, the museum hosts the art and couture ball to support its costume department, which holds around 33,000 objects across seven centuries of fashion history. Guests are invited to the Met Gala by invitation and a single ticket can cost up to $50,000. Though the price may seem high, there are expected to be roughly 400 guests in attendance tonight.
This year’s theme centers around the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who perhaps most notably served as the designer for Chanel. The theme is decided on by the Costume Institute’s chief curator Andrew Bolton before it is presented to the Met’s director and president.
For “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”, roughly 150 original looks will be on view next to Lagerfeld’s sketches and video interviews.
“At its heart, the exhibition will look at the evolution of Karl’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments,” said Bolton in an interview with Vogue. “Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum…He would say, ‘Fashion is not art—fashion belongs on the street, on women’s bodies, on men’s bodies.’”
Previous themes have included “Camp” (based on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay) in 2019 and “Heavenly Bodies” (which borrowed from the Vatican collection) in 2018, among others.
British screenwriter and actress Michaela Coel, Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, Swiss tennis player Roger Federer, and Albanian pop singer and songwriter Dua Lipa are this year’s co-chairs of the event, alongside Vogue‘s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
As Vogue editor Anna Wintour told reality star Lala Anthony on the red carpet, Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, was “intrinsically the chicest designer.”
Jessica Chastain donned platinum locks and Wayfarers in honor of Lagerfeld’s almost comically consistent personal style. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X, Jared Leto, and Doja Cat took it furthest, wearing looks inspired by Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, who inherited a pretty penny from her late master.
Many of the stars at the event had close working relationships with the iconic designer, such as supermodel Naomi Campbell, who started working with Lagerfeld when she was 16, and Nicole Kidman, who attended the Met Gala in a dress Lagerfeld designed for her 20 years ago for a Chanel No. 5 ad campaign.
A central figure of haute couture, Lagerfeld built a complicated legacy between his prolific career and his controversial, nonstop commentary on “fat” models like Heidi Klum, who he famously said was “simply too heavy,” along with any other model above a size zero.