Having just thumbed through some of this year’s Met Gala arrivals pics, I have a feeling this year will go down as one of the best (perhaps a close second to Heavenly Bodies in 2018). Every year’s event has a theme and this year’s is ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ to honor the life and work of the designer and creative director, who passed away in 2019.
The spectacle of what happens on the steps on this first Monday in May always generates some cognitive dissonance, often forces publicists to draft statements, and sometimes inspires protest — as all art should. And as Lagerfeld always did.
As I glanced up from one screen filled with pretty dresses and extraordinarily bejeweled nails, to the TV news, where scenes of demonstrations in Paris filled the frame, I suddenly got flashbacks to that 2014 Chanel Spring/Summer presentation in Paris, where Karl Lagerfeld envisioned a street protest to close his show.
Cara and Giselle playfully led what can only be described as a faux feminist protest, with models clutching signs that regrettably read things like: Ladies First, Feminist But Feminine, Be Your Own Stylist, and Make Fashion Not War.
At the time there was a resounding collective groan — that is, outside of those at the show, who probably noticed the nod to pinstripe pantsuits and shifting hemlines, and frankly the jaw-droppingly intricate set. In the days that followed there was legitimate criticism of Lagerfeld’s past comments about women and about how vapid the whole thing felt. Yet the tableaux that Lagerfeld crafted was etched into a year described as one in which women’s voices acquired authority, with Time magazine declaring 2014 “may have been the best year for women since the dawn of time.”
Cute.
This was of course three years before Time named the “Silence Breakers” its 2017 Person of the Year, citing Tarana Burke, Ashley Judd, and Terry Crews as forces behind this watershed #MeToo moment. It was three years before The Women’s March, a U.S.-centered but worldwide protest on January 21st, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump.
The world we live in now is one where we see images of protest and demonstration on our screens, in our feeds, and on our streets with such regularity that something about the image Lagerfeld created to end that Spring show almost a decade ago feels agonizingly current.
Did we miss the point? Was it about feminism? Or was that the kernel of a thought that got away from under him? I’ve been around plenty of brilliant creatives whose ideas get gold-plated or watered down and altered by well-meaning collaborators and production teams. Were those signs really the product of a tight brief? Did Lagerfeld mean to tell an albeit slightly gaslighty story of women’s rights? Or was he wanting to a create a feeling of people taking to the streets?
Now, I know you might be thinking I’m giving the guy way too much credit. What could a fashion designer possibly foretell about the future of civil uprising, a geopolitical tilt toward populism and a reaction to government overreach? How could he have known that a vast majority of us from small towns to sprawling cities would at this point in time have attended a march, painted a sign, protested a hearing, joined a sit-in, a lie-in, a die-in?
If you’re still tracking with me, you’ll point out that demonstrations were happening all over the world in 2014 and have been happening for hundreds of years. Perhaps you think there was nothing potent or culturally-arresting about Karl Lagerfeld closing a show with a seemingly random performance about random rights.
But I’ll ask you to suspend disbelief for the sake of this post and maybe out of respect for the designer’s contributions to culture, on a night when the Met Gala — the worlds of art and fashion — honor his life.
I’ll ask you to consider that perhaps fashion does see into the future of our culture; that fashion is sentient and it wants to tell us something about what we’ll be doing, how we’ll be spending our days and moving around spaces for years to come.
Perhaps that 2014 fashion show was giving us a glimpse into a world in which clutching a hand-painted sign telegraphing our values would be as benign as a holding a clutch containing our valuables.
