How Hip Hop Influenced Karl Lagerfeld’s World of Fashion 

The beautiful show of black and white ensembles on the 2023 Met Gala, as seen on visitors like Keke Palmer, Tems and Balmain designer Olivier Rousteing, was in tribute to Karl Lagerfeld, whose 60-plus years of design is featured within the 2023 Costume Institute spring exhibition: Karl Lagerfeld, A Line of Magnificence.

Greater than 200 designs from the previous inventive director of Chanel, Fendi and his namesake label will be considered at The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York Metropolis by way of July 16, 2023.

Often called a revolutionary within the trend business, Lagerfeld was equally impressed by the hip hop revolution of the Nineteen Nineties. His Chanel 1991 Fall/Winter assortment featured color-blocked denim, pendant necklaces and physique chains made widespread by TLC, Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige. In 1999, Lil Kim sported a Chanel tracksuit designed by Lagerfeld.

Lagerfeld’s right-hand man for many years was fellow designer Eric Wright, an American Black man. As Lagerfeld’s trusted lieutenant within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties at Chanel after which later at Fendi, Lagerfeld used him as a bouncing board for concepts.

Lagerfeld’s most ardent collaboration with a Black celeb undoubtedly belongs to Pharell Williams, who, by the way in which, is now the boys’s inventive director at Louis Vuitton. The 2 developed a detailed friendship and labored collectively on Reincarnation, a movie that promoted Chanel’s Pre-Fall 2015 marketing campaign. The “Comfortable” singer walked in Chanel’s runway present and made historical past when he turned the primary man to star in a Chanel purse marketing campaign in 2017. Their final collaboration was a Chanel capsule faculty in 2019, launched after the designer’s demise in February of the identical 12 months.

Together with her love for Chanel baggage from 2014, Nicki Minaj and Lagerfeld additionally fashioned an admirable bond. She wore his head-to-toe Fendi designs on the duvet of her 2018 single “Chun-Li.” After Lagerfeld’s demise in 2019, Fendi introduced an artist capsule with the rapper-actress entitled “Fendi Prints On,” a tribute to their collaborative spirit.