A Sternly Witty Sensualist

On entering “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Met last year, I was at first reduced to nouns and adjectives. I was overcome with description.

An ensemble of an overdress and underdress for Chanel Autumn/Winter 2002–2003. The overdress, in a dark gray cashmere knit, is as formally cinched as a suit jacket. The underdress is made from a lighter gray silk satin with ivory, beige, and gray silk tulle and embroidered with iridescent gold, pink, gray, black, and white bugle beads and sequins. The reason for this sequence of blandly material terms from the exhibition label is that I have no other way of describing what I was looking at: the sensual and supernatural way the underdress pooled in a rippled silver circle around the wearer’s feet, contrasting so beautifully with the meticulously sober overdress.

Beside it, a zipped black jacket with stitched red ellipses for Lagerfeld’s own label, made from what was maybe scuba material, with a miniature elongation to the left sleeve, a little flap, to keep a metro ticket in.

An “Atys” ensemble from Chanel A/W 1987–1988, named after the opera by Lully. The jacket is like a doublet in blue and white silk satin, embroidered not just with gold sequins, gold and white beads, and gold and blue silk thread but also blue and white camellias. The seventeenth century of Lully’s royal opera reflected via Serge Lifar as the eighteenth-century dancer Auguste Vestris in a costume by Chanel—the bottom of the jacket flaring out so it looks like a shorn-off farthingale.

Lagerfeld seemed to like this idea of shrinkage to create unexpected shapes. In a black and white silk satin dress from Chanel A/W 1991–1992, the kind of engulfing guardainfante worn by the miniature princess in Velázquez’s Las Meninas has been wonderfully shrunk to above the knee while maintaining its outstretched form, which floats in a seemingly impossible circle around its wearer.

For a moment I became drenched in longing. To have seen these clothes on actual humans! To have seen these materials move, at nightclubs and penthouse parties! Had I ever been in such circles? I felt acutely that I had not. There was a somber melancholy, moving among these mannequins and their immobile arms, as if these clothes didn’t want to be looked at so inquisitively. They wanted to perform. Perhaps writing on fashion, I thought, needs a more fictional mode, something like those medieval narratives of statues that start to acquire their own animation.

But gradually this demonic sensual pleasure relaxed into something more like thinking. With Lagerfeld, it seems, there were always two registers at play: the register of reference and the register of technique. A jacket and trousers from Chanel Spring/Summer 1985, for instance, is pure Watteau Pierrot, in cream silk crepe de Chine and silk chiffon. It has Pierrot’s buttons and ruffle sleeves and pleated collar, but you then realize that what makes it an improvement on Pierrot’s outfit is the way the pleats aren’t gently molded but are mechanically precise, and aren’t allowed to sit in the usual shape but are folded in waves around the neck, a papery extravagance.

Elsewhere there were imitations of crazed exuberance: in a Chanel ensemble from S/S 1993, over a pink silk crinkle chiffon slip is a dress of clear plastic, painted and embroidered by Maison Lesage with curlicues and vase motifs taken from the Lyon silk hangings and upholstery used to decorate the walls of Marie Antoinette’s billiard room. From Chanel A/W 2010–2011, a dress made of white organza, whose embroidery uncannily and extravagantly imitates the latticework border of a Meissen plate, while the bolero over it is embroidered by Maison Montex with painted Rhodoid flowers, like the multicolored sprays painted on the plate’s center. In some way, therefore, a plate has been expanded into a dress, like some new demonstration of topology revealing a doughnut and a coffee cup to be aspects of the same form.

And oh, the flowers! There was a cape made of flattened camellias in pomegranate, their color and shape surely a pun on the French word grenade, both the explosive and the fruit; and a Chanel wedding dress from A/W 2005–2006, a matted surface of 3D white silk camellias, made by Maison Lemarié: the art of parurier floral—artificial flowers—at its most beautiful and extravagant. A surface undulates to become a thing, so that decoration is elevated to the level of a principle.

In some of these details, I began to think, hesitantly, lurked the possibility of a theory. But maybe there was no need for a theory at all.

The set design for the show, by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, was white and pure, sometimes like a temple, sometimes more like a spa. Curved dividers in the rectangular space created small rooms. Most of the mannequins were arrayed in sequences, either in separate niches or in rows on shallow plinths. Particular ensembles were given their own spotlit plinths at the center of each space. Here was a place of logic, it seemed to say: intellect somehow converted into boleros and seed pearls.

The show opened with two staged gestures that seemed intended to argue more explicitly for this effect. The first thing you saw was a recreation of Lagerfeld’s desk, with its piled litter of books and letters and paper, just as it was once photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Around you the air was electrified by a kind of birdsong: the squeaking of felt-tip pens making lines on paper, the soundtrack to a video of Lagerfeld making one of his infinite series of sketches.

This was all pensiveness and thinking, in other words, and then you turned a corner and were in a space called Premières d’Atelier: an array of twenty ensembles and dresses, arranged together on two curved plinths, whose making was discussed in video projections by some of Lagerfeld’s premières d’atelier—the heads of studio in his various couture houses. Lagerfeld liked to send his premières a continuous series of sketches for them to transform into draft toiles and then eventually their final form. “I see in three dimensions and I have a technique that I can put it on paper and the people that I work with can read the sketch as if they see the dress,” he explained. And it may be that the best discourse on Lagerfeld is in these interviews with Anita Briey from Chloé and Karl Lagerfeld, Stefania D’Alfonso from Fendi, Olivia Douchez from one of Chanel’s ateliers flou, and Jacqueline Mercier from one of Chanel’s ateliers tailleur for more structured outfits. Briey describes that black jacket in scuba material:

There’s a seam down the center back of the jacket, and because the sleeves are cut like a kimono, in one with the bodice, we have a series of vertical panels that are joined together. On one side of the back alone, we can count four pattern pieces here. When we return to the front, the cut is just as complicated. I’d say that complex cuts were part of the vocabulary that defined the Karl Lagerfeld brand. Even the cuts at Chanel didn’t change much when Karl took over the jackets—the richness is in the material. He used so many different colored yarns and such sublime materials that there wasn’t a need for overly complicated shapes. I think that Karl had a great time at Karl Lagerfeld working with these flatter materials that had more stretch to them.

In placing this double image of desk and atelier in the spectator’s thinking, the show offered an expansion of its larger argument. The title given to this survey of Lagerfeld’s giant output was “A Line of Beauty.” In the eighteenth century the British artist William Hogarth wrote a brilliant, mulish treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, outlining his theory of the “line of beauty” as something serpentine, gothically British, as opposed to the classical, reactionary straight line. Although Hogarth’s print to illustrate this theory was exhibited adjacent to the recreation of Lagerfeld’s desk and is also reproduced as a beautiful foldout in the lavish catalog, it seems difficult to see how his eighteenth-century argument against conventional connoisseurs in any way relates to the cosmopolitan Lagerfeld, until it turns out that the phrase is simply the way the curator, Andrew Bolton, is trying, not without panic, to structure this exhibition of Lagerfeld’s manic productivity:

The serpentine line signifies his historicist, romantic, and decorative impulses, while the straight line indicates his modernist, classicist, and minimalist tendencies. These two lines are divided into nine “sublines” presented as dualities: feminine/masculine; romantic/military; rococo/classical; historical/futuristic; ornamental/structural; canonical/countercultural; artisanal/mechanical; floral/geometric; and figurative/abstract.

The problem he is trying to resolve in this comically oxymoronic list of binary oppositions is the entire conundrum of Lagerfeld, and it has preoccupied me ever since. Did Lagerfeld have genius? Is fashion an art form? What is authentic? Did he believe in anything? Does it matter? Why are we here?

To start again, therefore: What kind of person could be deduced from these clothes? Or maybe more importantly: What idea of beauty or form or style might that person have? As I faced the contradictory profusion adorning these blank mannequins with their arms held to their sides or folded behind their backs, I didn’t find it easy to locate an answer. Ever since Lagerfeld entered the world of clothes, it seems that no one has been entirely sure about his authenticity. By the time he died in 2019, he was one of the world’s most famous designers: his silhouette—with the sunglasses and the high collar and the eighteenth-century ponytail—so recognizable that it could be printed on H&M T-shirts, and his cat, Choupette, such a celebrity that she had her own beauty line with Shu Uemura and her own personal Instagram account. He had endless power and extravagance, which makes it all the more strange how often the question of his talent was persistently and awkwardly raised.

Lagerfeld’s career began in 1954 with the International Woolmark Prize, whose jury included the designers Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, and Hubert de Givenchy. He won the prize for best coat, while Yves Saint Laurent won the more prestigious prize for best dress. Their apparently asymmetrical trajectories became somehow allegorical, most brilliantly described in Alicia Drake’s compulsive account of the era, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (2006). Where Saint Laurent cultivated the image of the tortured artist, Lagerfeld preferred an aura of the affectless hit man: a hired gun brought in to do a job on a label. Eventually Saint Laurent set up his own couture house. Meanwhile Lagerfeld joined Chloé, which was dedicated to the new form of ready-to-wear. Both of them loved extravagance, entourages, houses, art, and, in one famous instance, the same man: the reactionary dandy Jacques de Bascher, who combined an embarrassing snobisme with more likable passions for narcotics and S-M.

As they grew older, the allegory grew starker. Saint Laurent burned out and moved into museum shows and archival presentations. Lagerfeld persisted in his methodically extravagant production ethic: the entrepreneur to Saint Laurent’s saint, continuing to design for Chanel and Fendi until his death. But in this traditional dichotomy of art and money, or the artist and the stylist, it feels like something is missing, or being missed.

Lagerfeld was born in 1933 in Germany, to haute-bourgeois parents: his father made a fortune in the unromantic business of evaporated milk, while his mother ran their upscale houses in the Hamburg environs. The story of his life has been told so often that it now forms a kind of fairy tale: how he moved from provincial Hamburg to Paris, then won the Woolmark Prize and began working for Balmain. After that he designed for other houses, often simultaneously—Chloé, Fendi, and finally Chanel—while also developing his own Karl Lagerfeld brand and working on projects for a dazzling variety of other businesses and labels, from the supermarket Monoprix to Max Mara.

Everything in his biography came to be fabricated or embellished by him: a texture of repressions (his parents’ equable membership in the Nazi Party) and inventions. The fantasy biography constructed in interviews had its contrast in the legend of his ferocious work ethic: he was said to wake at 5:00 AM to sketch for four hours before doing the rounds of his studios. Along with Saint Laurent—and also Kenzo and Alaïa and Claude Montana—he was at the center of a scene: a little Parisian complex of incestuous ensembles who all went to Le Sept and Le Palace, together with Grace Jones and Andy Warhol and many narcotics, the clothes photographed by Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. The era was summed up by Roland Barthes in Vogue-Hommes in 1978:

Leaning down over the dance floor of Le Palace throbbing with colored beams and dancing silhouettes, divining around me in the shadow of levels and of open loges an entire ebullition of young bodies busy in their unsuspected circuits, I seemed to recognize, transposed to the modern, something I had read in Proust: that evening at the Opéra, where the house and the boxes form, under the young Narrator’s impassioned eye, an aquatic milieu, gently illuminated by aigrettes, by glances, by jewels, by faces, by gestures suggestive of those made by undersea deities, amid which sat enthroned the duchess of Guermantes.

What hope for an era when even its semiologist is seduced by its glamour and shares its fevered references? Its idea of chic was old-school and ancien régime: Proust, but also a collage of Fragonard and Watteau and Marie Antoinette, or the court of Louis XIV or Ludwig of Bavaria, or the porcelain manufactories of Sèvres and Meissen and the eighteenth-century cult of chinoiserie. Money was so fervently adored in this world that it seems jejune to note that when the Socialist president François Mitterrand took office in 1981, Lagerfeld immediately moved for tax purposes to Monte Carlo. Fashion—or at least the version of fashion that governed out of Paris in the 1970s and 1980s—doesn’t care about your disdain or critique. Like capital, fashion can take anything.

These references to aristocracies and power structures were consumed in such a high-speed manner that it’s easy to accept this practice of imitation and quotation as something natural rather than a consciously invented technique. It was Antonio Lopez—a fashion illustrator of inspired profusion and member of Lagerfeld’s original entourage—who introduced him to the idea of a mood board: a way of thinking about inspiration as something collaged and free-form. Lagerfeld saw how beautifully it matched his own intelligence, a kind of computer that reduced all of world history to a Rolodex of names, and he made the mood board central to a designer’s manner of thinking. But what does it really mean that a dress or a collection should reference something else? In what way does a reference create meaning? There’s a comical moment in the catalog to the Met’s exhibition, when Bolton riffs on a Karl Lagerfeld dress from S/S 2004, a white silk crepe dress hand-painted with black alphabetic letters and numbers. On the front of the dress the alphabet descends in order—AB/CDE/FGH/IJK—with L just hidden around the left leg.

For Lagerfeld, fashion was not the mute, unversed art that some critics imagine. Rather, like the designer himself, it is literate and intelligent, capable of conveying letters and linguistic form, as his “alphabet” dress loudly and loftily proclaims. Reconciling textile and text, the dress also projects a Barthian rhetoric: arranged in alphabetical order, the letters KL take on the weight and import of the designer’s initials—a sign, at once boastful and fetishistic, recognized and appreciated by only the most astute and observant of logophiles.

It’s easy to laugh at this attempt to load a dress with meaning—at the idea that intelligence might consist in the ability to convey letters; or the apparent confusion of Karl Barth and Roland Barthes, even if how Barthes might be relevant to something as simple as alphabetical order is opaque; or the implication that noticing that K and L come next to each other in the alphabet might require the highest skills of observation, not to mention the fact that in the original sketch for the dress Lagerfeld is clearly worried by the juxtaposition of K and L, so that a first list of letters jotted down beside the dress’s silhouette runs: “AB/CDE/FGH/ILK.” But I wonder if the attempt is more just a misplaced form of thinking.

The idea of the reference that Lagerfeld and others invented in Paris isn’t intertextual; it isn’t literary or a way of producing meaning. Instead it removes all density from the world’s history. When Saint Laurent in 1965—to take a parallel example—printed dresses with designs taken from abstract paintings by Piet Mondrian, it wasn’t interesting as a moment in the history of art. It was remarkable because he discovered that a dress and a sequence of Mondrian squares could occupy the same form. The discovery imposed color and rigor on the idea of the cocktail dress. It didn’t, however, alter the idea of Mondrian.

All of this is why trying to decode the 1980s adoration for the eighteenth century, and especially Lagerfeld’s adoration, is complicated. In his aphorisms as well as the way he dressed and the way he furnished many of his houses, he aspired to imitate a style he believed matched the character of an eighteenth-century libertine. He liked to trace his love of the period to his love as a seven-year-old for a print of a nineteenth-century painting by Adolph Menzel showing Voltaire at the court of Frederick II, a scene that smuggles an ideal of intellectual conversation into a surface of gorgeously gilded chairs and silverware and one meltingly beautiful chandelier. Certainly for Lagerfeld the eighteenth century was more the curves of chaises à la grecque than A Vindication of the Rights of Woman or Toussaint Louverture or Jacques le fataliste. The eighteenth century he loved was mostly an ideal of decoration and of correspondingly lavish spending power. Even his idea of a libertine seemed brittle—the kinds of knowledge about pleasure acquired in the novels and novellas by Crébillon fils or Laclos seem impossible for the Lagerfeld version of a dandy, imprisoned in his lack of affect.

One of the persona’s persistent attractions for him was how it gave permission for a series of intermittently acidic aphorisms, as if he were Chamfort or Lichtenberg, an aphorist indifferent to such bourgeois progressive causes as feminism or animal rights or the deconstruction of classical ideas of beauty. Lagerfeld: fashion’s id! But then, precisely because it’s so desperately peremptory in its concision, the aphorism feels like an oddly defenseless form of language—the expression not of confidence but of vulnerability. And Lagerfeld’s constant evocation of an imperious eighteenth-century dandy feels like a more general solution to a constant sequence of anxieties. There was his anxiety in relation to desire, which it seems he hardly ever allowed himself in physical form; there was his anxiety in relation to his mother, who lived with him for many years until her death, and whom he then posthumously recreated as a kind of Wildean castrating wit, apparently schooling him through vicious put-downs; and then there was his anxiety in relation to his talent, not just compared with rivals like Saint Laurent but with antecedents like Chanel (from whom he borrowed not just an entire stylistic vocabulary of chains and matelassé stitching but also the taste for aphorism and reactionary politics). To be a dandy was a way of removing himself from the era while so passionately adhering to it.

The clothes in the exhibition were so dazzling in their textures and colors that it took me a little time to realize that they were nearly all classical suits and dresses, with the occasional cape or coat or bolero. The ideal of beauty Lagerfeld admired was insistently conventional. There’s a full-length jacket he designed for Chanel A/W 1996–1997: a seething gold surface, embroidered by Maison Lesage in a pattern inspired by an Orientalist Louis XV cabinet decorated with japanned panels imitating Chinese coromandel lacquer. It’s cut so close to the body that if someone wanted to wear it they would also need to wear a specially designed bodysuit underneath, to control the sad problem that a body is not a single brushstroke. Olivia Douchez, who worked with him at Chanel, observed that “Karl had a very specific approach to shaping the waist. He liked the dresses to fit a little high, not really at the natural waistline.” He worked incessantly on the waists and the shoulders and the sides of the ribs because his model was a type: a single slender line. That was the monotonous line of beauty from which he could not deviate.

And yet there were many times, as I walked through the exhibition, when I found myself moved in a way that is difficult to forget. It beautifully placed reproductions of Lagerfeld’s initial sketches beside each ensemble or dress, letting the spectator trace the movement from sketch to final creation. His sign has become his black-and-white silhouette, but a more accurate symbol for Lagerfeld would be the clusters of colored pencils he kept on his desk. His premières all describe the excitement of receiving his first sketches, and then the crucial transformation that would occur between the first toile and the final work, which was the decision on materials. Somewhere in this ability to play with texture, and especially the expected texture, is the arcanum of Lagerfeld’s genuine intelligence, a kind of sternly witty sensuality.

In his reign at Chanel, Lagerfeld oversaw an accumulation by the house of smaller savoir-faire maisons, which are deservedly listed in the catalog and credited for each outfit: Desrues for costume jewelry and buttons, Lemarié for feathers and artificial flowers, Michel for hats, Massaro for shoes, Goossens for gold- and silversmithing, Guillet for corsage and artificial flowers, Atelier Montex and Lanel for embroidery, Causse for gloves, Barrie for cashmere, Lognon for pleating…And it was in the room where the artisanal was most in focus, the space devoted to the juxtaposition of Artisanal Line/Mechanical Line, that a certain circuit of preoccupations became illuminated.

There’s a wedding dress from Chanel S/S 2015 whose first drawing by Lagerfeld is a profile view of a woman in headdress and tunic and a dress that flows out in a scribbled train behind her—a mélange of smudged and looping lines. It’s therefore a shock to see what this bare sketch became: a meadow of three thousand 3D flowers, in organza, Rhodoid, chiffon, and silk, with little points of rhinestones and iridescent beads, while over it is a tunic, also barely present in the sketch but now embroidered with shimmering ivory sequins in a contrasting silver surface. Or, turning the effect inside out, something wonderful could also be done with unexpected flatness. A Fendi dress from S/S 2009 has a frank precursor in a costume Léon Bakst designed for Nijinsky for the ballet Le Spectre de la rose, a kind of network of bandaged flat roses. Lagerfeld’s drawing for his updated version is simply a bare outline, with circles for the flowers. But what then happened in the atelier was that these circles were transformed into flattened-out roses, hand painted in white, cream, and pink, then appliquéd to a nude tulle dress—as if an album of pressed flowers has somehow come to life (see illustration above).

It’s difficult to formulate any general theory of how Lagerfeld approached materials. Certainly in his work there’s nothing like a severely modernist truth to them. Many choices are governed by a love of mimicry or trompe l’oeil, like a Chanel A/W 1996–1997 coat that looks like fur but is made from strips of silk tulle, dyed brown and black to resemble mink. It has its reversed twin in a Fendi coat from 2005–2006 that’s made of fur folded into such precisely billowing waves that I felt it had to be fabric. This love of trickery is partly pure wit, but it’s more a display of virtuosic intensity, like a famous piece from his first Chanel collection, S/S 1983: Inès de La Fressange walked out in a simple black dress apparently lavishly covered in jewelry, which in fact was made from embroidered beads, pearls, and crystals, including a halter of piled necklaces that was also securing the dress because of its plunging back. Or at another end of the spectrum, he made a deconstructed jacket with deliberately distressed holes, as if a digital moth had gone to work, a jacket of lightness and fragility but with braiding almost invisibly sewn along the outline to keep it from falling apart. “There are things the human hand can’t do, and there are things the machine can’t do,” he said. “I use both because they are available. I mix the very best of the human with the very best of the machine. It’s the mix that is interesting.”

Availability! It caused such confusion and malice in some of his critics who saw how Lagerfeld avidly took advantage of every opportunity, but it’s this exploration of the polymorphous possibilities contained in materials that was the validation of what might too grandly be called his method. (“My colleagues and I were sometimes [left] speechless by the things that he knew,” observed one première. “We would say to each other, ‘Gosh, imagine if he had known how to sew.’”) One way of thinking about what happened in the 1970s in Paris is to see it as an anguished wish for fashion to become an art. Saint Laurent in particular was lacerated by time—at once desperate to be spiritually and commercially synchronized with the present moment while also creating works of permanent beauty that could live in a museum. That kind of double vision had already been demolished by his idol Chanel:

A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive…. The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.

Lagerfeld the hit man always liked to point out that his only loyalty was to the moment. In the catalog to the Met’s Chanel show in 2005 he wrote, “Fashion is also an attempt to make certain invisible aspects of the reality of the moment visible.” Less philosophically, but saying the same thing, he observed in 1982, “What do I stand for? The reflection of the spirit of the time—whatever season it is. Or more simply, fashion opportunism.” This attitude feels more likable than Saint Laurent’s obsession with glory. And in a way it also represents Lagerfeld’s deepest connection to the era of the libertines. Crébillon fils wrote a celebrated dramatic dialogue, La Nuit et le moment, devoted to outlining a theory of the moment, the idea that there would be a fragile but definite moment in any interaction with another person when seduction was possible.

But I wonder if another idea of the moment is really Lagerfeld’s final lesson. For the Chanel S/S 1984 collection, he made a quick sketch that seems to show a dress simply illustrated with a design from a piece of Chinese porcelain. After thousands of hours of work, the final dress emerges as something ecstatically inventive. It’s made of organza embroidered with a shimmering matted network of blue, white, and clear seed beads and crystals so dense and so smoothly reflective that it doesn’t just recreate a design but an entire porcelain surface. You can look from the sketch to the dress and back again, infinitely. What you’re looking at is a present moment not of anything as boring as a zeitgeist or an era, but the patient, absorbed present of pure making. And that, perhaps, is what Lagerfeld really understood by beauty.