On Might 6, actors, fashions, designers, athletes, politicians, and the world’s high tastemakers will attend the 2024 Met Gala on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. The theme? “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Vogue”—which is able to unearth among the rarest, and most stunning, items within the Costume Institute’s everlasting assortment.

The Met Gala theme is a vital one. It dictates the costume code (which this 12 months is “The Backyard of Time”), the decor, and most significantly,  the bigger goal of the evening itself. The gala is, sure, a serious star-studded fundraising occasion, however its significance goes past {dollars} raised and social media impressions made. It’s a grand show of artwork as style and style as artwork, exhibiting how each varieties comprise and outline our cultural cloth. 

Every theme is chosen with the utmost consideration, asking: What story does this inform? What historical past does it train? In 2018, “Heavenly Our bodies: Vogue and the Catholic Creativeness” showcased lots of of holy gadgets from the Vatican. A couple of years earlier, “China: Via the Wanting Glass” celebrated China’s affect on Western and Jap design, whereas Might 2019 explored “Camp” and its exaggerated artifice.

Beneath, we’ve charted out every year’s Met Gala theme relationship again to 1995, the primary 12 months Anna Wintour turned a chair of the occasion. 

2023: “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Magnificence”

2023’s Met Gala was in honor of Karl Lagerfeld, the polymath designer whose six-decade profession modified style trade as we all know it. That includes 150 items spanning from 1950 to 2019—which included high jobs at Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his personal eponymous label—the exhibit explores his artistic course of and, due to this fact, legacy. But the present, stresses The Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Cost Andrew Bolton, isn’t a retrospective. “We didn’t wish to emphasize Karl the person, who has lengthy been the topic of breathless mythologizing, largely the results of his personal self-invention,” he informed the press in his opening remarks. As a substitute, they targeted on the various ideas that ruled his genius, organized by visible traces crafted by famed architect Tadao Ando. “The serpentine line signified his historicist, romantic, and ornamental impulses, and the straight line denoted his modernist, classicist, and minimalist tendencies,” Bolton added. 

2022: “In America: An Anthology of Vogue”

“In America: An Anthology of Vogue” was the second a part of the Metropolitan Museum’s examination of American style. (The primary, “In America: A Lexicon of Vogue,” debuted in September 2021 and served because the theme for that 12 months’s Met Gala.) Whereas “Lexicon” was an expansive take a look at American style as an entire—particularly its youthful designers—Anthology acted as a historic retrospective on each the designs and the tales of their makers. “The tales actually mirror the evolution of American model, however additionally they discover the work of particular person tailors, dress-makers, and designers,” Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Cost of the Costume Institute, explains. “What’s thrilling for me is that among the names might be very acquainted to college students of style like Charles James, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta, however quite a lot of the opposite names actually have been forgotten, neglected, or relegated to the footnotes of style historical past.”