The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a 2023 retrospective of Karl Lagerfeld’s lifetime oeuvre. With a career spanning from the 1950s to 2019, the uber-designer drew inspiration from such wide-ranging sources that the exhibition was thematically organized along these “lines”—Feminine Line/Masculine Line; Romantic Line/Military Line; Rococo Line/Classical Line; Historical Line/Futuristic Line; Ornamental Line/Structural Line; Canonical Line/Countercultural Line; Artisanal Line/Mechanical Line; Floral Line/Geometric Line; Figurative Line/Abstract Line; and finally, by itself, the Satirical Line. (Aptly, the exhibition’s catalog was entitled A Line of Beauty.) It was awe-inspiring to wander through room after room of beautiful Lagerfeld creations and see the immense and dazzling breadth of his vision and work.
But two garments in the exhibit gave me pause. Lagerfeld created these pieces for the Chloé label’s 1976-77 autumn/winter collection—the “Du rêve” dress (far left at top), made of cream silk crepe de chine with hand-painted chinoiserie motifs of figures, branches, and florals, and the “D’or” ensemble (second from left at top), a blouse and skirt of gold Lurex overlaid with black silk mousseline, again with hand-painted chinoiserie motifs of scrolls, figures with parasols, and florals. What these descriptions from the exhibition notes omit though was that the figures painted on the two pieces were depicted with topknots, black slants for eyes and “Fu Manchu” mustaches (see the two in-text pictures with close-up views). It was quite jarring to see—this blithely unaware representation of a flatly rendered, offensive archetype. Was Lagerfield simply engaged in a cultural exchange, par for the course in a globalized fashion world? Or was this an act of cultural appropriation, a casual taking by a European designer using simplistic ethnic imagery to represent the other?
Two other garments included in this part of the exhibit were a coat from the Chanel 1996-97 autumn/winter collection, made of black silk organza and black silk satin embroidered with polychrome sequins and gold beads (second from right at top), and the “Enfance” ensemble (far right at top), from Chloé’s 1977 spring/summer collection, a dress of ivory silk crepe de chine with hand-painted red chinoiserie figures and landscapes. These garments didn’t trouble me, even as designs evoking Orientalism, a fabricated view of the East existing in the West of the 1700s. The coat in particular was directly inspired by a Louis XV cabinet lacquered with the same decorative motifs.
I didn’t write about the Met’s Lagerfeld retrospective for over a year because it took me this much time to sort out my feelings about it. What is culturally insensitive or appropriative depends on both the maker’s intent and the viewer’s lens, with overall power dynamics also playing into the equation. While the Chinese nation may take it as a compliment when outsiders adopt their cultural signifiers, a Chinese American with a different lived experience and understanding of ethnic symbolism and context in the U.S. might find the power imbalance too apparent to ignore. The colonialism-infused recalling of the Orientalist tradition in the Chanel coat and the “Enfance” dress ironically dampened (but did not eliminate) their problematic nature because, to me, they contained no claim of cultural authenticity. The broad-stroke rendering of an entire people in the “Du rêve” and “D’or” pieces, however, were disturbing as highly racialized depictions. Whether the use of another's cultural symbols in design amounts to an act of exchange or (mis)-appropriation is a complex, multi-dimensional question of intent, cultural literacy, and power dynamics, possibly an ever-changing balancing in our globalizing world.
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