Karl Lagerfeld, this year’s Met Gala theme, changed Chanel from drab to trendy. He pioneered the fusion of hip-hop culture with high fashion. He dressed and befriended celebrities, and he elevated mundane runway events into brilliant theatrical performances. He was also a self-described “big mouth,” loudly expressing his fatphobia. Without apology, he spoke out against gay men who wish to adopt children, refugees, sexual assault survivors, the #MeToo movement, and “ugly” people.
And he left the receipts and his own angry remarks behind. Lagerfeld passed away in 2019 after dominating the fashion world into his 80s. His legacy will be on display on May 1 at the star-studded fundraising event and its accompanying exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. His polemical tendencies, on the other hand, are unlikely to be on display. “He offended people right and left, making as much of an art out of the cutting aside as the perfectly cut double-face gown,” Vanessa Friedman, a New York Times fashion writer, wrote shortly after Lagerfeld’s death.
Lagerfeld’s selection for fashion’s greatest night has its detractors
“He judged,” Friedman wrote, “and knew he would be judged himself, but he didn’t care. Rather, he embraced it.” Lagerfeld’s selection for fashion’s greatest night has its detractors, though gala visionary and close friend Anna Wintour is certainly not one of them. An inquiry seeking her opinion on this aspect of Lagerfeld went unanswered. Jameela Jamil will not be among the 400 or so celebrities and elite from fashion, technology, politics, music, social media, cinema, TV, and sports who will mount the Met’s Grand Staircase for the gala. The actress and campaigner was a rare public figure to oppose the theme, taking to Instagram to praise his dress sense while condemning his “distinctly hateful” words, many of which were directed at women.
“Why is this who we celebrate when there are so many amazing designers out there who aren’t bigoted white men? What happened to everyone’s principles and ‘advocacy.’ You don’t get to stand for justice in these areas, and then attend the celebration of someone who reveled in his own public disdain for marginalized people,” Jamil wrote.
This year’s High Fashion Twitter Met Gala will not take place
In 2020, a group of internet buddies decided to democratize the A-list, invitation-only gala by creating a Twitter companion open to producers who submit digital couture based on the real thing’s annual theme. This year’s High Fashion Twitter Met Gala will not take place.
“As we approach the first Monday of May, the hf Twitter met gala team would like to announce that we will not be celebrating this year’s met gala as our values don’t align with the selection of Karl Lagerfeld as the theme,” the coordinators tweeted. Called the “living soul of fashion” by Wintour, Lagerfeld and his gifts were outsized. So were his words.
Lagerfeld said he was “fed up” with the effort to reveal sexual harassment, assault, misconduct, and rape
In the international fashion magazine Numéro in 2018, Lagerfeld said he was “fed up” with the effort to reveal sexual harassment, assault, misconduct, and rape. “What shocks me most in all of this are the starlets who have taken 20 years to remember what happened. Not to mention the fact there are no prosecution witnesses. That said I could not stand Mr Weinstein. I had a problem with him at amfAR,” he said, referring to disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and a gala held during the Cannes Film Festival to support the fight against AIDS.
“If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model! Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent. They’re recruiting even!” he told Numéro in the same interview when asked about accusations against stylist and former Interview creative director Karl Templer. To German news magazine Focus in 2009, Lagerfeld declared of plus-size models: “No one wants to see curvy women.” In 2010, however, to Vice, when asked if he loved both the emaciated and voluptuous in fashion, Lagerfeld said: “Yes, totally.”
Throughout his career, the man who co-wrote a diet book after shedding 92 pounds (42 kilogrammes) in 13 months was loudly dismissive of ladies larger than size 0 or 2. This includes his support of designers’ use of only rail-thin runway models.
Brigitte declaring it would only publish photographs of “real women,” as opposed to professional models, Lagerfeld went on: “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly. The world of beautiful clothing is about ‘dreams and illusions.” According to the book “The World According to Karl,” a collection of Lagerfeld’s own words, he once said: “I think that for both women and men, fashion is the healthiest motivation for losing weight.”
“I shouldn’t say this, but physically he was quite repulsive,” Lagerfeld told Vice of Warhol in 2010. In the same interview, as he discussed his penchant for wearing dark glasses, he described a German journalist who once interviewed him as “some horrible, ugly woman.” Lagerfeld, who was born in Hamburg, criticised Merkel, then the German chancellor, for opening her country’s borders to refugees during Europe’s refugee crisis two years previously. “One cannot — even if there are decades between them — kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place,” he told the French talk show Salut les Terriens! on Canal 8.
Lagerfeld sent two brides down the runway in similar wedding gowns for the conclusion of his spring 2013 Chanel haute couture show
In some English translations, he offered this anecdote: “I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian and after four days said: ‘The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust.” However, others reported the comment this way: “I know someone in Germany who took in a young Syrian who spoke a little English. After four days, do you know what he said to the (German) lady? ‘Germany’s best invention is the Holocaust.” Either way, the words prompted hundreds of complaints to Canal 8.
Lagerfeld sent two brides down the runway in similar wedding gowns for the conclusion of his spring 2013 Chanel haute couture show in Paris, telling The Guardian that it was a gesture of support for France’s same-sex marriage law. However, in a 2010 Vice interview, he spoke out against same-sex marriage, particularly between two guys.
“In the 60s, they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life,” Lagerfeld said. “For me, it’s difficult to imagine — one of the papas at work and the other at home with the baby. How would that be, for the baby? I don’t know. I see more lesbians married with babies than I see boys married with babies. And I also believe more in the relationship between mother and child than in that between father and child.” In 2013, while supporting same-sex marriage, Lagerfeld said he was “less keen” on same-sex couples being allowed to adopt.