Karl Lagerfeld hated retrospectives, so arranging a worthy tribute proved a delicate balancing act. Opera director Robert Carsen takes us behind-the-scenes of his process here.
Later that day, Carsen was in a storage facility where some 170,000 garments are stored when the Lagerfeld costume that he had admired in the sketch was brought out for his perusal. Minutes later, his cell phone rang and he was asked whether he would, in principle, consider directing a memorial tribute to Karl Lagerfeld that was then in the earliest stages of development. “I thought I’d seen a ghost,” Carsen recalls.
Carsen also looked to Lagerfeld’s decades-long collaboration on a multitude of book projects, including Anna Piaggi’s 1986, a collection of some of the vast trove of sketches that Karl had made of her through the years—and especially to his work with the publisher Steidl. Weeks into the process, though, Carsen came to the conclusion that “what I like about him best is—although perhaps especially his absolute refusal to do anything but look forward, to always be ahead of his time.
Meanwhile, the daunting task of humanizing the cavernous volumes of the Grand Palais with a floor plan the size of three soccer fields—and accommodating three huge video screens and 2,500 chairs—was solved when Carsen took inspiration from a photograph of the designer at work in his office in the Rue des Saints-Pères, where Karl had designed a geometric red, black, and white carpet inspired by Russian Constructivist art.
Karl disdained the idea of a retrospective of his fashion work, but to give a whisper of his achievements in the field, Lady Amanda Harlech worked to coordinate a highly edited selection of original Fendi, Chanel, Lagerfeld, and Chloé clothes, modeled in a stately dance, that represented over sixty years of design.
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