The Met Gala on Monday turned the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s steps into a stage for celebrity display, with guests including Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams ascending into a fundraising event that asked them to perform their relationship to fashion as art. The whole spectacle was built around access: a guest list, a ticketed carpet, and a museum-backed ritual that lets the already-famous decide what counts as culture while everyone else watches online.
Who Gets In, Who Watches
The dress code for the event was “Fashion is art,” and guests were told to “express their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” That instruction came wrapped in the authority of the museum’s Costume Institute, which uses the gala to raise money for itself and sets the dress code each year based on its spring exhibition. This spring’s exhibition, “Costume Art,” will “examine the centrality of the dressed body.”
For those who did not get tickets or a place on the guest list, the red carpet was still packaged as a product. The spectacle was available to watch online with the Vogue livestream. Ashley Graham, La La Anthony and Cara Delevingne were hosting the livestream starting at 6 p.m., with Emma Chamberlain interviewing guests throughout the night. The Associated Press said it would have a livestream of celebrities leaving a pair of New York hotels on their way to the gala beginning at 4:30 p.m. on APNews.com and YouTube, offering the first chance to see what attendees would be wearing before they reached the carpet.
Archive, Custom, and the Market for Prestige
The gala’s fashion focus raised the question of whether attendees would draw from fashion archives or wear custom creations from fashion houses. Archival fashion has become a red carpet phenomenon, with fashion-savvy stars seeking rarer pieces of fashion history. The article pointed to Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1937 collaboration with Spanish artist Salvador Dalí on a white silk dress with a lobster printed on the front, Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 shift dresses filled with Piet Mondrian’s blocks of color, and Marc Jacobs’ 2002 collaboration with artist Takashi Murakami to add his designs to Louis Vuitton.
That archive-versus-custom debate is part of the same machine: luxury houses, celebrity branding, and museum prestige feeding one another. The carpet becomes a showroom for the bosses of taste, where scarcity itself is the commodity.
The piece also said Monday’s carpet would give celebrities a chance to deliver their own performance art. It noted that the late designer Alexander McQueen was heavily regarded by fashion insiders as an artist and that he closed his Spring 1999 show with a piece of performance art in which machines sprayed Shalom Harlow’s white dress with black and yellow spray paint as she posed on a rotating turntable. It said past gala dress codes have honored designers and pulled from literature, and that last year the art of tailoring was center stage with the dress code “Tailored for you.”
How Institutions Rewrite the Story
The relationship between fashion and art has not always been embraced. Art historian and author Nancy Hall-Duncan wrote in her book, “Art X Fashion: Fashion Inspired by Art,” that in the 19th century art was perceived as classical and fashion was frivolous. When Yves Saint Laurent held the Met’s first fashion exhibit in 1983, the exhibit was met with heavy criticism. Since then, the museum has held countless fashion exhibits, and museums around the world have followed suit. The Louvre put on its first fashion exhibition, “Louvre couture,” last year.
The dress code set by Anna Wintour and the Met’s Costume Institute curator, Andrew Bolton, was described as the final seal of approval that fashion is art, according to Hall-Duncan, who said, “Isn’t that a giant step?” and added, “It will indeed change perceptions.”
What that seal of approval really means is that a small circle gets to certify culture from above. The museum raises money, the fashion industry gets prestige, and the public gets a livestream. The people doing the labor, making the clothes, and paying to sustain these institutions are nowhere near the velvet rope, but they are expected to accept the pageant as cultural progress.