2023 Met Gala: pearls, pregnancy reveals and a giant cat celebrate Karl Lagerfeld – as it happened

All the coverage from fashion’s biggest night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This year’s theme was Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty. This blog is now closed

And Anna Wintor – Met Gala mastermind – has arrived, arm-in-arm with British actor Bill Nighy (not the science guy).

Speaking of Lagerfeld’s cat …

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Collared: Jared Leto to play Chanel supremo Karl Lagerfeld in biopic

The fashion-friendly actor will star as the larger-than-life designer, who died in 2019, in a new film project

Jared Leto’s foray into fashion continues. After playing Paolo Gucci in Ridley Scott’s sprawling House of Gucci last year and Gucci designer Alessandro Michele’s “twin” at this year’s Met Gala, he will now star as Karl Lagerfeld in a new biopic of the designer.

Lagerfeld, who died in 2019 at the age of 85, was one of fashion’s larger than life characters, so he undoubtedly has a theatrical dimension that would appeal to an actor. According to an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, when Leto first met Lagerfeld, he said to him: “You know, one day I have to play you in a movie.” Lagerfeld answered appropriately in fashion speak: “Only you, darling, only you.”

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Stella Tennant obituary

Model who rose to fame in the 1990s, capturing the attention of Karl Lagerfeld and gracing the pages of Vogue

No one in fashion could guess what would succeed the smiling, buoyant healthfulness of the international supermodels who commanded catwalks and covers in the late 1980s and early 90s. The unexpected next big things turned out to be very particularly British: bad-waif Kate Moss, and cool aristo Stella Tennant, who arrived on the pages of British Vogue in 1993. She has died suddenly, shortly after her 50th birthday.

Tennant’s appeal had been prefigured in the release that year of Sally Potter’s film of the Virginia Woolf fantasy novel Orlando, its hero/heroine (nothing so simple as androgynous) played by Tilda Swinton; pipe-cleaner thin, tall, pale, unpainted, with a body language both male and female, and an ever-unready smile. Totally Tennant.

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Viard’s first show as Lagerfeld successor marks new era for Chanel

After 30 years at the highest level of fashion, Virginie Viard makes debut as solo designer

“Complacency,” designer Karl Lagerfeld once said, “is the beginning of the end.”

Three months after his death, this spirit lives on at Chanel. The house has sprung out of mourning and back into action, transforming the Grand Palais in Paris into a Belle Époque railway station for the first collection by Lagerfeld’s successor, Virginie Viard.

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