How the Met Gala became the 'fashion Oscars'
It's the event that gave us Rihanna's 2015, much-memed, canary couture gown by Chinese designer Guo Pei (the internet thought it looked like an omelette) and Princess Diana, fresh from her divorce from Charles in a midnight blue dress from John Galliano's first collection for Christian Dior in 1996. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's annual "Met Gala" – which takes place on Monday – is truly deserving of its status as "the fashion Oscars".
But the story of how a slightly staid fundraiser, once a midnight supper at $US50 a plate for New York's upper crust, became the global zenith of fashion and pop culture is a lesson in the power of celebrity, money – and Anna Wintour.
Wintour, editor-in-chief of USVogue and artistic director of publishing house Conde Nast, became the chairwoman of the event in 1995, taking over its annual leadership in 1999. And every invitee to the now $US30,000 ($42,700) per person – and $US275,000 per table – event must be personally approved by Wintour.
One example: the current president of the United States, formerly a regular attendee who famously proposed to his wife Melania at the 2004 event, is no longer welcome since he took up residence in the White House. (In 2017 US TV host James Corden asked Wintour who she would never invite back. "Donald Trump," she answered, with her famous decisiveness.)
The event, which is held at the museum on the first Monday in May, always has a theme. This year it's Camp: Notes On Fashion. Others have included "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" (2018), "Manus x Machina" (2016) and "Punk: Chaos to Couture" (2013).
The theme always mirrors the Costume Institute's annual Met exhibition (which is launched on the night of the gala). This year's theme takes inspiration from writer and philosopher Susan Sontag's seminal 1964 essay Notes on Camp which looked at how high-brow art intersects with popular culture, its constructs and exaggerations and its upending of seriousness. As she writes, "one can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious".
The exhibition will include pieces from the likes of Schiaparelli, Alessandro Michele for Gucci and Jeremy Scott for Moschino.
While it's not specifically stated that guests should dress to the theme of the exhibition it's taken as understood, even if it's not always well-executed. It has led to much interesting analysis (and no doubt some panicked calls to celebrity stylists) on what is and isn't "camp" in fashion.
Wintour co-hosts the event with hand-picked celebrities who are, for that year and moment, at the top of their game. This year the line-up includes Lady Gaga, Serena Williams and Gucci artistic director Alessandro Michele. Previous hosting duties have been conducted by Beyonce, Amal Clooney and Rihanna.
The Met Gala was started by fashion PR dynamo Eleanor Lambert in 1948 as fundraiser for the Costume Institute. (Lambert would later become known for the infamous "Battle of Versaille" fashion show: In 1973 she took five of the top American fashion designers at the time – Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows and Anne Klein – to compete with five French fashion houses – Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin and Christian Dior. It was a move that put US fashion on a global stage.
The Met gala really started gaining traction when the iconic Diana Vreeland, a freshly booted Vogue editor-in-chief who had been installed in a position at the Costume Institute (rumoured to be thanks to a discreet call from Jackie Kennedy) took over the event.
With her incomparable style and imagination, she introduced the idea of themes for the galas. As Vreeland once said, "Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world." And so the Met Gala became intriguing, and altogether more glamorous and interesting.
As designer and author Steven Stolman wrote of the event in the Vreeland era, "There, it was pure Vreeland: faceless mannequins, often with pantyhose pulled over their heads to further obscure their features, arranged in dramatically lit tableau. There was evocative music and sometimes even fragrance was pumped into the air. Regardless of the fashions being presented, it always felt like a delicious opium den."
Vreeland's themes included "The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of China" (1980), "Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design" (1983) and "The Age of Napoleon" (1989).
These days, the event is big business. In every sense. In 2015, The New York Times reported that the Met Gala had raised more than $US145 million since Wintour took the reins. The figure is expected to surpass $US200 million after Monday's event.
Wintour is famous not only for her rumoured chilly demeanour (though it's said she's actually just shy) and her sharp bob, but also for forever changing the face of fashion magazines. She was criticised for putting a non-model on the cover for the first time (Madonna in 1989), but the newsstand sales proved her right, and a new relationship between celebrities and fashion was forged.
Her artfully curated Met Gala guest list is a mix of famous names from the entertainment, sport, political and business worlds, with a sprinkling of on-the-rise people whom she chooses personally.
Big brands buy tables and invite celebrities and brand ambassadors to attend. There are usually about 600 to 700 guests, but millions will watch the footage and click through the online galleries of the red-carpet arrivals.
It is both extremely exclusive and yet has mass appeal; it's accessible for anybody with even a passing interest in celebrity and fashion.
Although the punters can only ogle up to a point. In 2015 Wintour banned social media inside the venue (the ultimate insider's move). However social media maven Kylie Jenner (and her equally famous sister Kim Kardashian) famously defied the rule in 2017 with a bathroom selfie that included model Lily Aldridge, musician Sean "Diddy" Combs, model (and Michael Jackson's daughter) Paris Jackson, and actress Brie Larson.
The selfie, as well as many Met Gala moments throughout the years, went viral. Celebrity and fashion at its most theatrical makes for a heady mix, from that "omelette" dress (which was said to weigh 25 kilograms and featured more than 50,000 hours worth of hand embroidery) to Beyonce attending the gala solo the week after she premiered her groundbreaking album Lemonade . She strode the red carpet in a nude latex Givenchy dress, and let the world continue speculating about the state of her marriage to Jay-Z.
Not bad for a museum fundraiser.
