Tonight, all eyes will be on Fifth Avenue as Hollywood’s most glamorous stars make their way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala. With tickets as pricey as $50,000 a person, it’s an event that always attracts its fair share of controversy; some see it as the fashion event of the year, while others see it as an obscene display of wealth. This year, however, there’s an added layer of contention thanks to the fact that the theme for the glitzy gala is the late Karl Lagerfeld.
In previous years, the Met Gala has opted for more generic themes like “camp” or “punk.” This year, however, they’ve decided to center the event around one specific fashion designer — specifically, Lagerfeld, who was the creative director of Chanel and Fendi, and who also happened to be an objectively terrible person who hated fat people and repeatedly spoke out against (yes, against) the Me Too movement. (For a more extensive rundown of the many, many awful things Lagerfeld has said about plus-sized women, Muslims and sexual assault victims, click here.)
Will a Karl Lagerfeld Biopic Gloss Over His Many Controversies?
Jared Leto is slated to portray the Chanel creative director in a forthcoming movieWhy deviate from the usual format to celebrate one man who so perfectly embodied everything wrong with the fashion industry — the fatphobia, the promotion of eating disorders, the belief that models are somehow asking to be objectified and sexually assaulted — when they could have gone with literally anything else? Hell, even a Chanel theme that paid tribute to some of Lagerfeld’s designs for the brand would have been more palatable; Coco Chanel was a Nazi, but a broad retrospective spanning the brand’s entire 113-year history would make it easier to celebrate its legacy while also acknowledging the problematic figures of its past. Yet this year’s Met Gala apparently has no plans to pay any attention to Lagerfeld’s controversies.
In a recent interview on The Business of Fashion podcast, curator Andrew Bolton said that he “wanted to focus on the work rather than the words or the man.” “Because, yeah, he was problematic,” he added. “There were things he said that were, yeah, difficult. And, again, did he mean it? Or was it a deflection? I don’t know, it’s hard to know.”
Is it really though? When someone repeatedly reveals himself to be a hateful bigot over the course of several decades, should we not assume that he meant it? When the Lagerfeld theme was announced, actress Jameela Jamil shared an Instagram post rounding up some of Lagerfeld’s most inflammatory quotes. (It’s worth a scroll…there are some doozies in there.)
As Jamil wrote in her post, Lagerfeld “used his platform [in] such a distinctly hateful way, mostly towards women…. Why is THIS who we celebrate when there are so many AMAZING designers out there who aren’t bigoted white men?”
It’s a good point; there is absolutely no reason that the Met Gala couldn’t have gone with a different theme. There’s no word yet on what exactly the Lagerfeld theme will entail, but based on how he carried himself when he was alive, we can only imagine it will involve turning away every celebrity who’s larger than a size two at the door. What will someone like Lizzo, who has long preached body positivity and is among tonight’s confirmed attendees, have to say on the red carpet about Lagerfeld’s history of encouraging women to starve themselves because, as he put it, “no one wants to see a curvy woman”? What will Bella and Gigi Hadid, who grew up Muslim, have to say about his Islamophobic comments about Syrian refugees? Will anyone bother to ask them?
Ultimately, it comes down to money and status and the seemingly endless list of transgressions people are willing to overlook in order to gain access to them. No one wants to speak out of turn and risk pissing off Anna Wintour — a longtime friend of Lagerfeld who, by the way, also has a long history of defending disgraced designers accused of things ranging from anti-Semitism to rape — thus putting their invitation to next year’s gala in jeopardy. And of course, Wintour herself is willing to turn a blind eye to god-knows-what because Vogue needs fashion brands to advertise in its pages in order to survive.
The truth is, though, the Met Gala needs celebrities like Lizzo more than they need it. It’s a relic from a bygone era — one when the fashion industry could still get away with preaching exclusivity instead of inclusivity — and it gains more cultural cachet by having contemporary stars grace it with their presence. That’s what makes this all so difficult to stomach: just like there’s absolutely no reason for a Lagerfeld theme, there’s absolutely no reason for the celebrities in attendance who Lagerfeld himself surely would have had some vile things to say about were he still alive to put their principles to the side and pretend like there’s anything worth celebrating about him and his crusty old beauty standards in the year 2023.
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