Architect Tadao Ando has been commissioned to design this year’s Costume Institute exhibition highlighting the work of Karl Lagerfeld. The opening of the exhibition titled “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” was marked by the world-renown Met Gala, a fundraising event attended by celebrities and personalities perceived to be culturally relevant in the fashion scene. Perceived as a thematic and conceptual essay on Lagerfeld’s work, rather than a traditional retrospective, the exhibition aims to illustrate the designer’s method of creative expression and its significance in the industry.
Tadao Ando first met Lagerfeld in 1996, when the late designer commissioned him to create a design studio in Biarritz, France. The project was never completed, but its direction influenced the collaboration with the Met’s Design Department. The resulting concept strives to create a physical manifestation of Lagerfeld’s creative dynamism through the intersection of straight and serpentine lines.
The exhibition’s theoretical framework is inspired by Willian Hogarth’s book “The Analysis of Beauty,” which describes the contrasting character between serpentine S-shaped lines representing liveliness and movement, but also Lagerfeld’s historicist and decorative impulses, and straight lines alluding to stillness and inactivity, as well as modern, classist and minimalist tendencies. As both themes are present in Lagerfeld’s work, the exhibition uses this duality to anchor its subsequent sections: feminine and masculine, romantic and military, rococo and classical, historical and futuristic, ornamental and structural, canonical and countercultural, artisanal and mechanical, floral and geometric, and figurative and abstract.
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12 Architecture Events to Pay Attention to in 2023The exhibition also illustrates the significance of the designer’s creative practice, as he introductory gallery is dedicated to the premières d’atelier—the seamstresses regarded as the architects of Lagerfeld’s vision, responsible for translating his two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments. This creative collaboration is also explored through a series of on-camera interviews conducted by French filmmaker Loïc Prigent, who followed and documented the late designer’s collections from 1997 to 2019.
Recently, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando was commissioned to design the MPailion in Queen Victoria Gardens in Melbourne, taking part in Australia’s foremost annual architecture competition and design festival. In 2021, the architect also led the transformation of the historic Bourse de Commerce, introducing a minimalist and contemporary aesthetic within the prestigious heritage building.
