Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty
The Costume Institute Undergraduate and Graduate Student Fashion Design Competition
Spring 2023
Winner
The Metropolitan Museum of Art invites sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates and
graduate students enrolled in fashion design and related programs to participate in a design
competition inspired by the exhibition Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, organized by The Met’s Costume Institute.
The Costume Institute’s spring 2023 exhibition will examine the work of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019).
Focusing on the designer’s stylistic vocabulary as expressed in aesthetic themes that appear throughout his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019, the show will spotlight the German-born designer’s working methodology. Most of the approximately 150 pieces on display will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s sketches, which underscore his creative process and the collaborative relationships that he developed with his premières, or head seamstresses. Lagerfeld’s fluid lines united his designs for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, creating a diverse and prolific body of work unparalleled in the history of fashion. Drawing on the theory of art and aesthetics expressed by the 18th-century English artist and writer William Hogarth as the “line of beauty,” the exhibition is anchored by two related, but diverging, lines: the “straight line” and the curving “serpentine line,” which delineate, respectively, Lagerfeld’s modernist and historicist tendencies. These lines explore different stylistic representations of themes that the designer returned to again and again, and are punctuated by
intersecting moments—or “explosions”—that exemplify points of convergence.
For example, the “ornamental line,” representing the serpentine axis, is in counterpoint to the” structural line,” a representation of the straight line, or modern impulse. In addition to the Ornamental line v.
Structural line, other sections in the show focus on dualities that include: the Abstract line v. Figurative line, the Artisanal line v. Mechanical line, the Canonical line v. Countercultural line, the Feminine line v. Masculine line, the Floral line v. Graphic line, the Historical line v. Futuristic line, the Rococo line v. Classical line, and the Romantic line v. Military line.