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Lagerfeld’s German exhibitions

Karl Lagerfeld, Germany’s most famous fashion designer, enters the museum.

30.03.2015
© dpa/Franck Fernandes - Karl Lagerfeld

It is he who is meant when people talk of the German “fashion czar”. Besides braid and dark glasses, barbed comments are part of Karl Lagerfeld’s trademark. And of course the cult cat “Choupette”, who lives with him in Paris. But what lies behind this shimmering life, what makes for the creative element? His works since the mid-1950s already testify to an unerring flair for the contemporary sense of life and its corresponding translation into fashion. Since the start of his career, Lagerfeld has worked for luxury fashion houses such as Fendi and Chloé. As artistic director and chief designer for Chanel, he is regarded as the only legitimate successor of its founder, the fashion legend Coco Chanel. But Lagerfeld has not rested on his laurels. Over seventy – the information on the year of birth varies – he is still an icon of the zeitgeist and one of the world’s most renowned fashion designers. Recently, German museums have devoted several exhibitions to this eccentric workaholic.

Haute couture in Bonn

In the spring of 2015, the Art and Exhibition Hall Bonn is showing Karl Lagerfeld. Modemethode (i.e. Karl Lagerfeld. Fashion Method). It is not a presentation of his entire œuvre, but focuses instead on his work in haute couture. Work on the collection is the focal point, for the “fashion method”, Lagerfeld’s guiding principle, is an overall concept: from the first sketches to the finished garment, from the accessories to the scenery and the music for the fashion show to the graphic design for the press, advertising and display windows – every detail is supplied by the master himself. With this exhibition, the Art and Exhibition Hall devotes itself for the first time to Lagerfeld’s fashion world and relates, quite by the way, a piece of twentieth and twenty-first century fashion history. In 2014, the Folkwang Museum in Essen already mounted an exhibition entitled Karl Lagerfeld. Parallele Gegensätze –  Fotografie – Buchkunst – Mode (i.e. Karl Lagerfeld. Parallel Contrasts – Photography– Books– Fashion). It showed Lagerfelds’s creative range: fashion, drawing and photography, film, books and product design. With the exhibition Feuerbachs Musen – Lagerfelds Models (i.e. Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models), the Hamburger Kunsthalle presented in the same year an unusual double show on grace, eroticism and the worship of muses and models. It placed paintings by Anselm Feuerbach side by side with previously unseen photographs by Karl Lagerfeld.

Exhibition: Karl Lagerfeld. Modemethode (i.e. Karl Lagerfeld. Fashion Method) until 13 September 2015 at the Art and Exhibition Hall, Bonn

www.bundeskunsthalle.de

www.karl.com

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