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On the fashion calendar, few dates are as important as the first Monday in May. That’s when the Met Gala, the annual fundraising party for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is held.
The party of the year, as it’s often called, the Met Gala celebrates the museum’s latest blockbuster exhibition. All of the Costume Institute’s exhibitions serve to place fashion—old and new—within the context of contemporary culture. Past displays have considered historical periods, specific genres like punk, and individual design innovators including Paul Poiret, Alexander McQueen, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Following “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”—the most ambitious show undertaken by the Costume Institute and the museum’s most attended show ever—is 2019’s blockbuster “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” opening May 9. Using Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 tract as a framework, the evolution of this concept of exaggerated and knowing amusement will be traced from “from sun kings to drag queens.” Expect drama, color, scholarship, hilarity, and one of the most anticipated red-carpets ever.
Not for the reclusive, the Met Gala is the hottest ticket in town. With its m-a-j-o-r red carpet, the event is, in the words of Hamish Bowles, Vogue’s International Editor at Large, “an ever more glamorous arena for high fashion.” (The many-stepped entrance allows for trains to display at full impact, too.) Among the sartorial highlights have been Kate Moss’s 2009 arrival in a draped lamé minidress accessorized with a shimmering turban, à la Gloria Swanson. Then there was the time when Sarah Jessica Parker and Alexander McQueen wore matching tartans to the “AngloMania” show. Rihanna’s voluminous yolk yellow Guo Pei gown launched a thousand memes in 2015; and the next year, on the heels of her groundbreaking Lemonade release, Beyoncé arrived solo, and, yes, slayed in a beaded latex Givenchy haute couture dress. The antithesis of a come-as-you-are party, the Met Gala is an A-list bash that serves, says Bowles, “to establish and confirm fashion trends, through both the exhibitions themselves and the bravura sartorial choices of the guests.”
Here, the editor tells the history of the Met Gala in 60 seconds flat.
See The Best Met Gala Looks of All Time
