A 65-year career is always a challenge for a retrospective to summarize. But what can an exhibition do when the artist draws not only fashion drawings but also Islamophobic caricatures? When he hides his family’s Nazi past to make a career in Paris after the Second World War?
These are the pressing questions in light of the upcoming exhibition Karl Lagerfeld: a beauty line at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, opening May 5, 2023. The exhibition will be preceded by the famous Met Gala tonight, May 1. From the museum’s recent public announcements, it’s clear that this exhibition is a celebration of Karl Lagerfeld (1933-2019) and his work that leaves no room for criticism.
Lagerfeld’s life contains not only the story of a multi-talented and commercially successful designer, but also a political biography that has yet to be properly uncovered. To begin, consider how Lagerfeld deals with his family’s Nazi past. On a German talk show in 2012, he told this anecdote from after World War II: On his way to the dentist, he and his mother ran into his teacher. “You can’t even tell your son to cut his hair?” the teacher asked the mother. She backed off and replied, “Why? Are you still a Nazi? Lagerfeld gave the impression that the mother was standing up to the Nazis, but at this time he hid the fact that his parents were in fact Nazi sympathizers.
Only research after Lagerfeld’s death provides reliable insight into his family history. In a biography published in 2020, journalist Alfons Kaiser wrote that the creator’s mother and aunt shared a positive attitude towards National Socialism. While his aunt turned away from the Nazis after the pogrom against the Jews in November 1938 – known as Kristallnacht or the night of broken glass – his mother remained loyal to Nazi ideology until the first years of the war. His father, Otto Lagerfeld, became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, the year he began to control the German parliament. Karl Lagerfeld was also born that year. As the founder of a condensed milk company, his father hoped membership would bring him business benefits. His parents went out of their way to demonstrate their allegiance to the system, flying the swastika flag on their property after Austria’s annexation (Anschluss) on March 12, 1938. After the war, his parents allegedly lied to the Denazification Commission and thus escaped possible punishment; his father is critical of the regime and his mother hides her membership of the party.
Karl Lagerfeld cannot be held responsible for the botched work of the Denazification Commission or the misdeeds of his parents, but he has been complicit in keeping silent. He grew up in a family of convinced Nazis. He could have publicly criticized such socialization and would not have been the first to do so. A retrospective of his work should show how the designer benefited from his family’s political and economic opportunism during and after the Nazi era. It is important to remember how Karl Lagerfeld’s privileged environment allowed him to settle in Paris in 1952 and start his career there.
And when author Hal Vaughan proved in his book 2011 that Coco Chanel collaborated with the Nazis, tried to Aryanize her business, and had an affair with a master spy, Lagerfeld had already been Chanel’s creative director for 30 years. He was not known for his willingness to come to terms with Chanel’s past.
For him, the anti-Semites have always been the others, like the Muslims who have fled to Europe since 2015. Among them, he said on French television at the end of 2017, “We cannot – even if there are decades between them – kill millions of Jews in order to be able to bring millions of their worst enemies back to their place”. He reinforced these Islamophobic and xenophobic remarks by his cartoons, like a woman in a hijab at the borders of Europe. He also criticized then-Chancellor Angela Merkel for her humanitarian refugee policy. At one point he pictured her wearing a hijab and wrote in German: “Mrs. Merkel’s new migrant-friendly look…and you won’t have to go to the hairdresser forever. Although his visuals and arguments are right-wing populist, in other cartoons he has blamed Merkel for the rise of right-wing parties.
During the last years of his life, Lagerfeld destroyed his reputation at a breathtaking rate. While in previous decades he had refrained from making political statements for fear of harming his business, he shocked the public with his reactionary views before his death. Will the Met follow the creed of its successful years and banish the political, lest it damage museum business? Will the retrospective hide its crude views behind haute couture for the super-rich, sophisticated fashion for the economic upper class? Or will the Met live up to its museum claim and undertake a critical contextualization of Karl Lagerfeld’s work?
