A Fitting Tribute

WITH SIX DECADES of fashion for multiple major brands—including the reinvention of Chanel by playfully updating the brand’s couture heritage—Karl Lagerfeld’s expansive career makes for a sprawling retrospective. A Line of Beauty, on view through July 16, 2023, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, begins with a challenge to its own curation. Over its entrance is a quote from the late German designer: “Fashion does not belong in a museum.” As curator Andrew Bolton stated in his opening remarks, the exhibition is organized as a “thematic and conceptual essay … rather than a traditional retrospective.” It focuses not on Lagerfeld the impresario with his leather fingerless gloves and low white ponytail, nor his regular courting of controversy. Instead, the show joins his artful sketches with around 180 of his pieces and argues that, though he may have had no unifying signature style in his career, his bombastic runway shows and embrace of commercial success made fashion what it is today.