Met Gala Countdown

The Met Gala, held on the first Monday of May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the annual benefit that funds the museum's Costume Institute and opens its spring fashion exhibition. Famous for its themed dress code and red-carpet arrivals on the museum steps, it is often called fashion's biggest night.

History

The Met Gala began in 1948, when the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert organised a midnight supper to raise money for the newly founded Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tickets cost fifty dollars, and the guests were largely drawn from New York society and the garment trade. For its first decades the benefit was a dignified charity dinner, held at venues such as the Waldorf Astoria and the Rainbow Room rather than at the museum itself. The event was transformed in the 1970s, when the former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland became a consultant to the Costume Institute. Beginning with 'The World of Balenciaga' in 1973, each gala was tied to the theme of the Institute's new exhibition, the party moved into the museum's own galleries, and film stars, artists and designers began to mingle with the society patrons. The gala became a spectacle as well as a fundraiser, and its themes grew ever more ambitious. Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, took over as chair of the benefit in 1995 and steered it to global prominence. Under her stewardship the date settled on the first Monday of May, the dress code came to mirror each year's exhibition theme, and the red-carpet arrivals on the Met's Fifth Avenue steps became a worldwide media event, followed by livestreams and viewing parties far beyond New York. The gala now raises tens of millions of dollars in a single evening, and in 2014 the museum recognised its chair's role by renaming its fashion wing the Anna Wintour Costume Center.

Meaning

At its heart, the Met Gala is a fundraiser: it is the primary source of annual funding for the Costume Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's department of fashion, which must finance its own exhibitions, acquisitions and conservation work. The money raised in one evening sustains a year of scholarship and allows millions of visitors to explore fashion as an art form in the exhibition the gala opens. Culturally, the night celebrates the idea that clothing can be creative expression of the highest order. Each year's theme invites designers and guests to interpret a concept — from technology to time to a single designer's legacy — turning the museum steps into a shared stage. For audiences around the world, following the arrivals has become a springtime ritual, a global conversation about art, craft and imagination conducted through what people wear.