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Met Gala is Fashion’s biggest night out — hosted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York each year on the first Monday of May — and is both a forever-evolving spectacle and a carefully crafted event.
A parade of A-Listers dress according to the theme inspired by the Costume Institute’s latest exhibition (some more than others) and walk the steps up to the museum before disappearing inside to enjoy the galleries, dinner, and drinks.
This year, the theme for the red carpet is “The Garden of Time,” referencing a 1962 short story of the same name by British author J.G. Ballard.
Like the New Wave sci-fi story, which takes place in a garden of time-bending florals, the museum’s exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” highlights connections between nature and technology, using AI, CGI, and other tools to breathe new life into hundreds of fragile archival pieces spanning hundreds of years.
The theme is chosen each year by Andrew Bolton, curator-in-charge at the Costume Institute.
The Met Gala debuted in 1948 as a fundraiser for the nascent Costume Institute, organized by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert. Tickets for the banquet reportedly cost $50 each.
Over the decades, the gala has transformed from an industry fete at off-site locations like Manhattan’s Rainbow Room into an A-List phenomenon. In the 1970s, Vogue editor Diana Vreeland positioned the gala as the opening soiree of the Institute’s major exhibitions and invited the crème de la crème of the fashion world and New York society.
