I didn't say anything about his private person—I'm not talking about biography. I'm talking about the work, and I'm interested in how it looks now from the perspective of the present. We now have the luxury of retrospection, so we can examine his whole career, or we can isolate specific moments or periods within his career. It's not at all as simple as being "what it is."
Would you say that to someone who was trying to curate a show representing Karl's career? A curator has to interpret and select, so as to convey a sense of narrative/movement/change in an artist or designer's work. They can't just fill a gallery with every single one of Picasso's Blue Period paintings (etc.) and say "it is what it is." That would be both banal and a logistical impossibility. They have to select and order material, and the same applies to Karl—now that he's dead we can sort through his whole career, micro and macro, to get a sense of his genuine contributions. That's essentially what was happening in the Costume Institute show; they had to present a coherent sense of his oeuvre in 150 pieces (including Fendi, etc). In doing so (and we could argue about whether they were successful or not), they necessarily presented an interpretation of Karl distinct from his own.