A-list celebrities, fashion world icons, and the art world come together tonight at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala.
The museum hosts the art-and-fashion ball each year on the first Monday of May to support its Costume Institute, which holds around 33,000 objects across seven centuries of fashion history. Guests are invited to the gala by invitation and a single ticket can cost up to $50,000. Despite the price may seem steep, there are expected to be roughly 450 guests in attendance this evening.
This year’s theme centers around the exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which boasts roughly 250 rare pieces spanning 400 years of fashion history from the institute’s permanent collection. The show includes pieces designed by Dior, Givenchy, and Schiaparelli, with some garments that are too fragile to be put on display, like a Charles Frederick Worth ball gown from 1877, being shown via video animation, light projection, AI, and CGI. The highly sensorial show is split into three categories from the natural world: land, sea, and sky.
The gala’s official dress theme “The Garden of Time” was inspired by J.G. Ballard’s titular short story from 1962. (The writer’s texts also served as a source of inspiration for this year’s Whitney Biennial.) As such, the red carpet will likely see a number of ensembles incorporating flora and fauna.
The star-studded event is expected to deliver, with celebrities Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth serving as the night’s co-hosts.
Of course, the entire celebration would not exist without Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who started it, and has become synonymous with the Met Gala since 1995.
Viewers can tune in via livestream on Vogue.com (and on the publication’s associated digital platforms) to see the red carpet arrivals, beginning at 6 p.m.
