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Celebrate the Legacy, Ignore the History? Reflections on the 2023 Met Gala
BY SHEA DANCEY
Considered by many to be the most important night for fashion of the year, the Met Gala is an annual themed fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute where the biggest celebrities come together and show off their most creative fashion looks. However, along with the glamor of the Met Gala often comes some kind of controversy. In 2018, the theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” was slammed by Catholics for being sacrilegious. The 2013 theme “Punk: Chaos to Couture” was also criticized by people within the subculture who argued that the Gala contradicts everything that the punk movement stands for.
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So when it was revealed on September 30 of last year that the theme of the 2023 Gala would be “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”, it was immediately met with backlash. Karl Lagerfeld, who died on February 19, 2019 at the age of 85, was a controversial figure within the fashion industry. While he was a legendary designer and creative director for brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Fendi, and Chanel, he was also known for his anti-semitism, islamophobia, fatphobia, and criticisms of the #MeToo movement. Following the announcement, defenders of the theme claimed that despite Lagerfeld’s history, he was still a fashion icon whose legacy deserves to be celebrated.
On the other side of the debate were those who believed that the theme put Lagerfeld on a pedestal and glorified a very flawed person. On April 17, the High Fashion Twitter Met Gala (an online fashion community separate from the Met Costume Institute) announced that they were skipping out on the Gala this year because “our values don’t align with the selection of Karl Lagerfeld as the theme.” The day before the event, members of an advocacy group called the Model Alliance protested outside of the museum over Lagerfeld’s dismissal of sexual assault within the modeling industry. In 2018, Lagerfeld remarked, “If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a
