Turns out the first Monday in May is the perfect venue for celebrity image-making.
On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, will assemble at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They’ll enter the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remains entirely out of sight of the public’s gaze, so that all we see will be the arrival of the beautiful and wealthy. This is the Met Gala, and for an event that is theoretically just for fashion nerds and doesn’t even get televised inside, it has a remarkable cultural cachet.
The Gala, which falls on the first Monday of May, purportedly celebrates the Anna Wintour Costume Center’s keystone exhibit every year. It’s overseen by the Center’s eponymous queen: Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. This year, the exhibit is called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” and features some of the museum’s oldest and most fragile garments. Guests have accordingly been asked to follow the dress code “Garden of Time,” after a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, with moody florals, clock motifs, and even outstanding archival pieces all expected to fit the theme.
Wintour notoriously guards the guest list, but Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth are all celebrity co-chairs of the party. This year, exploding protests over the war in Gaza and a possible strike by Condé Nast workers also threatens to cast a shadow on the rarefied gathering.
When the Met Gala was first instituted in 1948, it would not have boasted such an A-list roster of hosts, nor such a trendy corporate sponsor (albeit one currently in crisis). The Gala has always been glamorous, but it used to be a local event, primarily a showcase for the society ladies of the Upper East Side. It took decades of careful strategizing and alliance-building with Hollywood to make the Met Gala the pop cultural phenomenon it is today.
Now, the Met Gala shines because it is an unparalleled occasion for celebrity image-building. It is a showcase for both the illusion of accessibility and unreachable glamour at the heart of modern celebrity.
Here’s how it got there.How the Met Gala went from midnight supper to opium-scented art show to celebrity showcase
The Met’s Costume Institute was born out of the Museum of Costume Art, a library devoted to the art of theatrical costumes. In 1946, Lord & Taylor president Dorothy Shaver decided to bring the collection to the Met. Fashion, she felt, needed the cultural power that comes from allying with a major museum. It needed its history preserved and its present recognized to be respected as a major and vital art form. The Met agreed to take the collection — with the caveat that the American fashion industry would be responsible for raising the funds for the Costume Institute’s entire annual operating budget. The Met Gala was conceived out of this grim necessity.
At the time, the party was planned by publicist Eleanor Lambert, and it didn’t even take place at the Met. It was a midnight breakfast hosted at Manhattan institutions like the Waldorf Astoria, Central Park, and the Rainbow Room. It was a glamorous affair, but it was for local society and fashion insiders only.
In 1974, Diana Vreeland arrived at the Met as special consultant for the Costume Institute from Vogue. There, she had been editor-in-chief and was fired, according to rumor, for refusing to mind her budget. Rumor also had it that New York society royalty Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Babe Paley campaigned for her to take the new post.
