It’s the first Monday in May: Welcome to Met Gala mania.With a livestream available when the evening gets underway, the world’s most fashionable fundraiser takes on one of the world’s most prolific and controversial designers, the late Karl Lagerfeld, as the starry party’s theme.
So how would the man of the hour, who died in 2019, feel about all the hullabaloo? Lagerfeld was a student of history, to be sure, but his eyes were forever on the future.
“Karl never wanted to have a retrospective when he was alive. He felt that it was funereal. He made the point that (Cristóbal) Balenciaga and (Coco) Chanel never had them when they were alive,” said William Middleton, who wrote the biography “Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld.”
Caroline Lebar worked with Lagerfeld for 35 years, rising to senior vice president of image and communications for his eponymous brand. Lagerfeld loved the Met, but he always said: “’I’m not an artist, I’m a fashion maker,'” Lebar said on the company’s site.
“He didn’t think his work belonged in a museum. Anna Wintour also mentioned this when she made the announcement about the theme,” Lebar explained.
The invitation-only gala earned $17.4 million last year for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, a self-funding department with a budget dependent on the A-list affair. The price of attending went up this year to $300,000 for a table and $50,000 for a single ticket.
Companies and brands buy tables and host many of the roughly 400 guests expected this year from fashion, film, music, theater, sports, tech and social media. They were asked to dress “in honor of Karl” by gala mastermind Wintour, a close Lagerfeld friend who first signed on to the event in 1995 and took over the helm in 1999.
