A Line of Beauty walks difficult line between celebrating designer and addressing recent debates
Deep in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Karl Lagerfeld exhibition is a small circular room housing an installation of 81 iPhones.
Each screen flashes with footage of Lagerfeld in 2011, giggling and stamping his foot at the peak of his powdered-wig pomp, and a series of “Karlisms” – including his famous declaration that sweatpants are “a sign of defeat”. There are also lesser-known phrases, such as: “I always say what I think, and sometimes even what I don’t think”, a remark that feels pertinent to debates that have swirled in the run-up to the show about whether the New York institution was wise to celebrate the designer in the first place.
