Karl Lagerfeld’s landmark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, was on view from May to July 2023, marking one of the most significant fashion retrospectives in the museum’s history. The exhibition traced Lagerfeld’s extraordinary career across decades, revealing his rigorous discipline, graphic sensibility, and intellectual approach to design—from his early years to his transformative work at Chanel, Fendi, and beyond. It stood as a definitive institutional recognition of Lagerfeld’s influence on modern fashion and visual culture.
This investigation into Karl Lagerfeld's (1933–2019) artistry explores his extraordinary sixty-five-year career, from the designs for Chloé and Fendi in the 1960s and 1970s to his celebrated leadership in the 1980s and beyond at Chanel and his own label. Inspired by the "line of beauty" theorized by eighteenth-century English painter William Hogarth, this dazzling publication pursues the straight and serpentine "lines" and their intersections in Lagerfeld's work as a means of understanding his unique creative process.
Andrew Bolton is the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Publisher: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Author: Andrew Bolton
- Pages: 436
- Illustrations: 340
- Format: Hardcover
- Dimensions: 9 1/2'' x 12''
- ISBN: 9781588397584
