2024 Met Gala Recap

Plus an overview of this year's exhibit, the dress code of the night, and why so many attendees underwhelmed.

TL;DR 

Best: Mona Patel, Swarovski, Tyla, Elle Fanning, Isabelle Huppert, Barry Keoghan, Lewis Hamilton, Dan Levy

Worst: Michelle Williams, Everyone Wearing Chloé, Chris Hemsworth, Cardi B, Lizzo 

What was the theme of the evening? 

The night’s festivities were actually, in a way, two-pronged. And both of those prongs were generous enough where guests had a lot of creative leeway with interpreting the theme of the night. 

Hold on, why does the Met Gala have a theme? 

It makes the evening fun and it also provides fashion watchers with an ‘interactive’ element to the night’s festivities. Fashion is, of course, a subjective thing. But it becomes more interesting to grade and to critique and judge when we have an established set of criteria against which to measure the clothes against. 

Much like Halloween in Mean Girls it’s the one night a year that people are encouraged to really go crazy with clothes and to push the limits of normal dress in order to creatively interpret an assignment. For Regina and her friends it’s dressing slutty. For Zendaya and her fellow co-chairs it’s dressing to theme. 

Taylor's Met Gala Evolution

The Exhibit 

The first was the exhibit itself titled Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. The exhibit itself features some 200+ garments that span four centuries of fashion eras. Many of the pieces themselves are so delicate and made from fabric that has become so friable they have to be displayed laying down in their cases. Hence the ‘sleeping’ aspect of the title. The exhibit really is a testament to the importance and the science of clothing preservation and the work that fashion archivists go into caring for and conserving these important artefacts of our times. Arguably, clothes are a huge reflector of our modern values and culture and every bit as important to historically archive and document as other remnants found in archaeological dig sites and preserved in your typical museums. I’d say the exhibit itself feels a little pointed in light of Kim Kardashian’s much-lambasted move at the 2022 Met Gala when she wore and subsequently destroyed one of the most valued and iconic pieces of clothing in American history. But I’m sure fashion conservationists everywhere are pleased that the museum is taking it upon itself to resolutely and loudly talk about the importance of safeguarding clothes and treating some of them with the careful deference they deserve. 

The other piece of the exhibit is a sensorial and interactive element that is intended to fully reanimate and bring the piece back to life in a manner accurate to when it was originally constructed. According to the Met, “When an item of clothing enters the Costume Institute collection, its status is changed forever. What was once a vital part of a person’s life is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled. This exhibition reanimates these objects, helping us experience them as they were originally intended—with vibrancy, dynamism, and life.” Guests are invited to touch, smell, and even envision (through computer generated images and other illusory techniques) how it might feel for the wearer of the displayed garments to have the piece on their bodies. 

The Dress Code 

Not to be confused with the exhibit itself, though I’d say that attendees definitely took to the exhibit’s theme of looking to the past and highlighting the ephemeral nature of fabric in their dress but the evening’s actual assigned dress code was based on the J.G. Ballard short story The Garden of Time. The short story tells the tale of an aristocratic couple, Count Axel and his wife, whose villa’s garden is full of “crystalline flowers with translucent leaves, gleaming glass-like stems, and crystals at the heart of every bloom” that also happen to have time-reversing powers. Beyond the peaceful confines of their villa, a mob encroaches the property seeking to level the classes by levelling the property of the rich. In order to keep the crowd at bay, the count plucks a flower to delay their approach. It becomes so that rather than face destruction by crowd, the count does so at his own hand, plucking his own beautiful garden until nothing of its beauty remains. The story ends with the angry mob finally coming to the gardens to find them derelict and picked clean with the count and his countess at the barren center of it all frozen into a garden statue to forever survey his desolate land. 

And on this cheerful theme we wear fancy floral outfits. 

On the literal note of the ‘garden’ theme I’d say that we can expect anything that references a crystal flower as low hanging floral fruit fashion-wise. 

For those aiming a little higher and more intellectually when it comes to theme interpretation, Vogue said that anything that captures a sense of “fleeting beauty” is considered adherence to the theme. For me this means anything that appears to have been touched or affected by the impacts of time and the very ramifications of damage to clothing that fashion conservators are trying so hard to fight against. Fabric that is tattered, scorched, frayed, damaged, coming apart, corroded, moth-eaten. Anything that might betray how at the mercy fashion is to the effects of time works for me. 

And with that, we get to the best part: 

Ruthlessly judging attendees.