This year’s Met Gala, held on May 6 in NYC, did not disappoint, as the fashionistas pulled out all the stops to see who could outdo one another for this year’s “Camp” Theme. It seems like this event not only draws the top A-Listers from the worlds of Fashion and Entertainment, but gets bigger and bolder every year.
The gala is an annual invitation-only fundraiser to benefit the museum’s Costume Institute, and includes a launch party for its spring exhibition. It’s a huge deal for the Costume Institute, which is the only curatorial department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has to finance its own activities, and the gala is its biggest fundraiser. The event was initially named the Party of the Year, but it’s only relatively recently that it fulfilled that promise. From 1948 to 1971, it was a true benefit, not an exhibition, held off-site at either the Waldorf Astoria or the Rainbow Room. Guests (mostly New York society types) indulged in fine dining and were entertained by “skits, raffles, and pageants of models in historic costume,” according to the museum’s records.
Former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland brought new glamor to the Costume Institute when she joined as a consultant in 1972. Vreeland curated some of the most ambitious and heavily publicized exhibitions in its history, and used the gala as an opportunity to inaugurate them. Her themes were exotic and far-reaching — “The Glory of Russian Costume,” “La Belle Époque,” “The World of Balenciaga” — and no detail was ignored. (Chanel’s 1924 fragrance Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather) was pumped through “The Glory of Russian Costume,” for example.) That’s when the galas became launch parties for the exhibitions, where designers, industry insiders and fashionable celebrities turned out in full force.
Anna Wintour, Vogue’s current editor, shifted the focus to celebrities when she took over as chairwoman in 1999, recruiting A-list honorary and co-chairs (including Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Tom Brady) and inviting everyone from Lil’ Kim to Kim Kardashian to attract more attention to the event. (The Vogue team’s participation in the planning and execution were the highlight of the 2016 documentary “The First Monday in May.”)
Now that it’s moved on from its society roots, the gala’s biggest names are A-list models, musicians and actors, though occasionally a megawatt outsider will get pulled into its orbit. (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — who co-chaired the event in 1977 and 1978 — Princess Diana and Henry Kissinger all made appearances.) Filling the rest of the seats (only about 600 people were invited in 2015) are brand representatives, emerging designers, and invited patrons happy to spend upwards of $30,000 for a ticket. But this hasn’t always been the case.
“Back then you could buy a $100 dessert ticket, which allowed all kinds of riff-raff (like me and my date Suzanne Bartsch) to sneak in,” Barneys creative ambassador Simon Doonan wrote of his first gala experience in 1985. “Yes, it was great hanging out with Tina Chow and Andy Warhol, but the highlight was seeing a very young Miss J (yes, from ‘America’s Next Top Model’) vamping into the Temple of Dendur in full drag.”
This year’s exhibition, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” examined “how the elements of irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration are expressed in fashion.”
“We are going through an extreme camp moment, and it felt very relevant to the cultural conversation to look at what is often dismissed as empty frivolity but can be actually a very sophisticated and powerful political tool, especially for marginalized cultures,” curator Andrew Bolton told the New York Times in October.
Vogue.com has a slide show of some of this year’s best highlights. Click here to view.
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Photo Credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com
Photo Credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com