This year’s Met Gala, which took place yesterday, chose Karl Lagerfeld as its theme. Although I served a brief apprenticeship in the sartorial world as a young student, my interest in fashion is rather limited. Yet the late German designer, who claimed Swedish heritage and had ties to both the Roman Catholic and Old Catholic Church, has piqued my interest for more reasons than one.
For starters, much like Bob Dylan, Lagerfeld’s life is shrouded in mystery. The mystery, however, is self-perpetuated: Lagerfeld claimed to be of Swedish heritage on his paternal side, but this has been shown to be demonstrably false. I have since seen an article in Vogue claiming that he is Swedish on his maternal side. Lagerfeld has been closely associated with Vogue for decades, so any truth-claim might be taken with a grain of salt. But why he has felt a need to claim lineage from the far North is bewildering and somewhat amusing. In an interview with Swedish Elle magazine, the designer said he was never very interested in family history, but affirmed his love for Swedish culture, citing Selma Lagerlöf as one of his favourite authors, Carl Larsson as a painter he “love, love, loves” and speaking of his admiration for Queen Christina, who abdicated to become Catholic, as well as Greta Garbo who “made Swedish beauty internationally famous”. As a Swede myself, I can’t help but feel a little proud.
There is a common, usually deeply affected snobbism amongst the learned who look down their noses at the world of fashion. It’s not real art, goes the reasoning. A lot of it is, admittedly, decadent and corrupt. But so, one might argue, is Hollywood, the music industry, and the world of contemporary “plotless fiction”. Moreover, the life and work of Lagerfeld himself is proof of the contrary. In a recent Guardian article, it was reported that he spent over half a million euros a year on books at the Paris bookshop Librairie Galignani. Through his designs he turned models into aesthetic icons, shaped the look of the modern age, and is said to have lived by the classical German ideal of Bildung – a word with no real equivalent in the English language that refers to something like learning for the sake of learning. Lagerfeld studied history voraciously and his work often referenced the Baroque and Rococo styles.
Following the Enlightenment and later Romantic thinkers, the late philosopher Roger Scruton raised the question whether art – more specifically high culture – can be a substitute for religion. He saw that art, like religion, could raise our hearts and minds to the beautiful and eternal, but did so in a time in which the religious doctrines on which the edifices of faith were built no longer hold a common appeal. On top of that, high culture also serves the cultish needs of humanity, helping us to satisfy our need to belong to a community. Scruton wrote:
“A high culture is a tradition, in which objects made for aesthetic contemplation renew through their allusive power the experience of membership. Religion may wither and festivals decline without destroying high culture, which creates its own ‘imagined community’, and which offers, through the aesthetic experience, a ‘rite of passage’.“
A legitimate question is whether fashion belongs to the canon of art. The snobbish attitude alluded to above often leads to a swift negative response. Think a little more deeply, however, and one begins to question this assumption just as quickly. In its finest manifestations, fashion demands skill, learning, an understanding of colour, history, and style. It is a phenomenon to which we can apply categories of taste and which requires training much like sculpting or painting. It is no accident that Lagerfeld was an accomplished draftsman himself.
Interestingly, Lagerfeld directly addressed the question of whether art, and therefore fashion – if we include it in the definition – can ever be a substitute for religion. In 2013 a documentary was produced called Karl Lagerfeld: Fashion as a Religion (German: Mode Als Religion), where he sought to ask the question whether “the belief of a Catholic priest and a fashion fan may even trigger the same physical reactions or feelings”. The premise might sound rather profane, and his answer seemingly banal. Lagerfeld confesses (if we can trust his biographical sayings) that his mother thought he would become an important figure in the Church. Instead, he became an important figure in the world and an icon – or perhaps, for some, an idol – in the fashion industry. I see a danger in placing any public figure on a pedestal, confusing a mere mortal for a deity.
Nevertheless, looking at his oeuvre and statements with a charitable approach, I think something profound can be learned: seeming profanities and rejections of the faith are often not as absolute as they might seem at first glance. Picasso, Rimbaud and Baudelaire all have it in common that they at varying times made crude remarks about the faith in which they were raised. But only someone with an attachment, however unconscious it is, could centre their creative work around something that they claim to reject. Karl Lagerfeld’s world was never far from referencing the Church, and in creating a beautiful pastiche perhaps he can lead the minds of some who might seem far from the faith to the real thing.
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