2023 Met Gala Is Upon Us, Legendary Designer Honored As Theme

The Met Gala theme is Karl Lagerfeld! The prestigious gala will use this year's event to honor the late designer.

Vogue revealed on Friday that the theme for their annual gala this year will pay tribute to the late Karl Lagerfeld. The beloved designer passed away four years ago at the age of 85 after battling pancreatic cancer.

The exhibition is officially called. “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” it will present the designs he has produced or was associated with in his long career spanning from 1954 to 2019. The designer curated designs across several brands like Balmain, Chloé, Fendi, and Chanel, in addition to his own line.

Lagerfeld was a regular at the gala and good friends with Anna Wintour the gala’s overseer. In 2015, he helped to put together the Met Gala, the theme that year was Chanel-inspired.

Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, told Vogue that “Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum,” so it's a bit odd that he would a theme they admitted.

Bolton went on to share that they have added a special touch just for Lagerfeld’s preference. 150 of the looks chosen will be displayed beside their original sketches by Lagerfeld himself. They wanted rot focus on the designer's love for sketching overall, fashion aside.

Bolton remembered a conversation he had with the designer at one of the many gala’s they attended together.

“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.’”

Bolton shares that Lagerfeld often threw tradition out the window or evolved it somehow ad this show plans on doing the same.

“One thing I knew for certain is that we could not do a traditional retrospective. For one thing, I think Karl would have hated that. Even though one of his facets was that he was a historicist, and he would revisit themes in his work, he was always looking to the future in his own work—he hated looking back at the past. It was something he had a very conflicted relationship with.”

And although we like to think that the gala is all about the red carpet moments, there is still a whole ceremony afterward that the celebs and fashionistas have to sit through.

Bolton shared some of the speakers that will help honor Lagerfeld at Met Gala 2023.“The speakers included some of the premiers he had worked with for years. He had a premier at Karl Lagerfeld who had also been with him at Chloe, and premiers at Chanel and Fendi—and these were the people he worked most closely with to translate his design into clothing. And they spoke of him with such love.”