The Met Gala is fashion’s night-of-nights and it’s finally here, with celebrities walking the carpet looking wonderfully weird and still, somehow, stylish. Not only does the event serve as a backdrop for some of the most iconic A-lister looks, but it also shapes our clothes and redefines pop culture every year.
The backbone of every Met Gala is its theme, chosen to reflect what’s inside the museum and used to inform the attendees outfits.
With this year’s theme ‘Fashion is Art’, we wondered how it’s selected and who gets the honour.
So we’ve done a little digging, and it turns out an ‘epiphany’ determined the theme this year.
What can we expect from the ‘Fashion is Art’ theme this year?
This year’s theme is one of the broadest that the Met Gala has ever had, which makes it both exciting and unpredictable.
It encourages attendees to think of their clothes as an artistic expression, but with no single era, palette or silhouette to lean on, it’s a very mixed bag on the carpet.
Think garments that tell a story and focus on craftsmanship, wearable sculptures or references to art movements… and a lot of limbs?!
How is the Met Gala theme chosen?
The theme is chosen by a group of people, most notably Andrew Bolton (Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute) and, of course, Anna Wintour.
Themes are typically grounded in serious curatorial concepts, and have previously ranged from ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’ (which was broad) to specific designers including Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld.
The theme is also decided based off the exhibition, not the other way around.
Bolton and his team develop the museum exhibition first, and then the Met Gala theme flows from that, with the Gala serving as the opening night of the exhibition.
While tickets to the Met Gala cost upwards of $100,000 and a table of 10 starts from $350,000 (yikes), anyone eager to attend the exhibition after the gala can usually get in for around $30 USD.
That’s more like it.
How an ‘epiphany’ decided this year’s Met Gala theme
While deciding the theme for this year’s Met Gala, Bolton claims he had an “epiphany” about all of the galleries at the Met.
“What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body,” he told Vogue, adding that even the nude is “never naked” but always inscribed with cultural values.
It fits in with the exhibition’s theme this year, Costume Art, which will feature 25 new mannequins modelled after diverse body types, and is a firm statement that the Costume Institute is not the “stepchild” of the museum, as Bolton puts it, but instead belongs alongside the other galleries in the Met portfolio.
Themes of the last 8 Met Galas:
2018 — Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination
2019 — Camp: Notes on Fashion
2020 — About Time: Fashion and Duration (cancelled due to COVID)
2021 — In America: A Lexicon of Fashion
2022 — In America: An Anthology of Fashion
2023 — Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty
2024 — Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion
2025 — Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
