by Robin Abcarian
The late Karl Lagerfeld once told me to ditch my glasses.
“You’re pretty,” he said. “They hide your eyes.”
He also told me a story about a client of his, a very rich woman, not very attractive, with one droopy eye. She addressed this “problem” by wearing hugely expensive diamond earrings, thus diverting attention from her face.
Yes, fashion designers can be very, very shallow.
But as last Monday’s Met Gala in honor of Lagerfeld showed, his imprint on the fashion world was profound. It has outlasted him, and it will undoubtedly outlast us all.
For hours, celebrities from all corners of the glammyverse walked, hopped or were lifted up the carpeted and tented steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in spectacularly beautiful clothes and over-the-top costumes inspired by Lagerfeld’s life and work.
Some, like Nicole Kidman, wore vintage Chanel couture. Janelle Monáe wore a triangular tweed tent coat by Thom Browne that reminded me of Mother Ginger in “The Nutcracker,” the character who lifts her dress to reveal a dozen children underneath. Instead of children, however, Monáe removed her coat to reveal a black sequinned bikini. How those people manage to sit down for dinner is a mystery.
Until the Met Gala, I had not realized how many people were aware of the designer’s relationship with his beloved white cat, Choupette. Jared Leto, for example, arrived in a full-on, “Masked Singer”-style white cat costume, and revealed himself only when he removed the head. Doja Cat, with a prosthetic cat nose, looked like she’d wandered off the stage of a Broadway musical. And a nearly naked, bejeweled Lil Nas X leapt around in a cat mask and silver claws.
Were it legal, Lagerfeld once mused, he would have married Choupette. “I never thought that I would fall in love like this with a cat,” he told CNN in 2013. Well, OK, fashion designers are not just judgy, they can also be weird.
The annual party, a fundraiser for the Met’s Costume Institute, has been overseen by Vogue goddess Anna Wintour since 1995. She creates the guest list and does not release it until the day of the event. If you are important enough to be invited to the Met Gala, I guess, you can put it on your résumé.
This year’s bash coincided with the launch of a Met exhibition celebrating Lagerfeld’s decades of work.
Though Lagerfeld designed for a number of design houses over the course of his 85 years, including Patou, Chloé and Fendi, he is most closely associated with Chanel, the iconic Paris luxury brand founded at the dawn of the 20th century by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Her famous interlocking “C” logo, instantly recognizable to anyone with even a passing interest in fashion, was popularized by Lagerfeld, who showcased it in many of the firm’s designs.
Thanks to Lagerfeld, Chanel probably has more unique signifiers than any other single fashion brand: strands of pearls, chains with leather woven into the links, camellias, quilted leather, bouclé tweeds with ragged edges, a black-and-white palette. The word “iconic” is so overused, but it really applies to the Chanel aesthetic.
Lagerfeld was creative director of the house from 1983 to 2000, a time that coincided with my stint as a fashion editor for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Detroit Free Press.
The job required my attendance at twice yearly runway shows in New York, Paris, London and Milan. The work was so much fun; it was the dawn of the supermodel era, and fashion designers were in the midst of a licensing frenzy that turned them into household names. Traveling on the house, I must say, was a fantastic perk of the job, but I tired of writing about hemlines and silhouettes, and being immersed in the tyranny of a world where you really could not be too rich or too thin. Also, I tired of explaining to my more “serious” colleagues why covering fashion was not trivial or frivolous. The industry is an important economic engine and, hey, everybody gets dressed in the morning. You may not realize it, but what you slip into before work or play has a lot to do with the creative vision of designers like Karl Lagerfeld.
Anyway, that explains how I ended up receiving unsolicited beauty advice from one of the world’s most famous fashion designers.
This must have been in the late 1980s, before Lagerfeld developed his signature personal look, the modern 18th century dandy: brilliant white shirts with impossibly high starched collars, slim black jackets, skinny jeans, a gray ponytail, fingerless gloves and always, always, always, impenetrable black sunglasses.
I guess it’s a sign of the times that when NPR ran a story last Monday morning about the Met Gala, it focused less on his contributions to fashion and more on some of his less savory pronouncements.
Like many of his colleagues, Lagerfeld had a distaste for female figures that were anything but rail thin and was not shy about saying so. As a result, choosing to honor him “reflects poorly on the industry,” said the “Morning Edition” host, paraphrasing her fashion journalist guest.
Well, that’s just silly.
Find me a fashion designer — male or female — who has not worshipped at the altar of the (often dangerously) underfed female, and I will show you a caftan maker.
Happily, times are changing. Monday evening, Lizzo showed up in a sleeveless black gown, adorned with vertical strands of pearls. It was custom made for her.
By the House of Chanel.
