The 2023 Met Gala Theme Explained

Mark your calendars: This year’s Met Gala is on May 1, 2023. The theme of the year’s biggest party will be “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” referencing the lines of Lagerfeld’s famous sketches, which will be presented next to his designs.

“At its heart, the exhibition will look at the evolution of Lagerfeld’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments,” the Met’s curator in charge, Andrew Bolton, told Vogue. “And what’s fascinating to have discovered: I always thought that his drawings were very spontaneous and almost impressionistic. But they were in truth extremely precise, almost mathematical. We couldn’t see it because we are not trained, but his premiers knew down to the millimeter what each line meant. It was almost a secret code, a language shared between him and those premiers, that only they could fully decipher.”

The exhibition will feature work across all of the houses he worked for: Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous brand. It’s his reign at Chanel, however, that I’m most excited to see. In the spirit of the exciting news, scroll down to revisit some of Karl Lagerfeld’s most memorable looks for Chanel over the years.