MET GALA 2021: fashion’s favourite bunfight

Almost a century ago, The Costume Institute was founded in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collection is now home to over 33,0000 objects representing seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories, but it faced funding issues upon its initial opening. To help save the collection and its exhibitions, the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert launched the “Costume Institute Benefit” in 1948, a midnight dinner that would raise money and mark the opening of the annual exhibition. The event quickly became labelled “the party of the year”.

In the early 1970s, former Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Diana Vreeland joined the Costume Institute as a consultant and began to shape the benefit into the heralded Met Gala we know today. Since then, the event has grown in notoriety and exclusivity and in 1995, Anna Wintour took over as chairwoman, moving the event to its iconic annual date on the first Monday in May.

Each year, the Costume Institute puts on a high-fashion themed exhibition and the Gala is dress-coded accordingly. Previous years have seen themes celebrating individual designers (Dior in 1996, Versace in 1997), historical periods (La Belle Époque in 1982), artistic movements (Cubism in fashion in 1998) and more abstract themes (Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology in 2016, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination in 2018). A lot has changed since its inception in the ’40s; ticket prices have gone from $50 to $35,000 and the event’s high fashion focus has been somewhat swamped by celebrity, but it is still largely recognised as “the party of the year”.

Due to Covid, last year’s Gala was cancelled and this year’s had to be hosted last Monday, rather than in May. To make up for missed time, the 2021-2022 theme is split into two halves: “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” will be on show from 18 September and guided this year’s event dress code and part two, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion”, will open on 5 May 2022, with a second Met Gala taking place on the same day. 

For those of us not quite chic enough to be on Anna Wintour’s radar and not quite rich enough to shell out for tickets, the fun of the Met Gala is seeing how celebrities and their designers interpret (or ignore) the theme and judging the best and worst outfits. 

Billie Eilish took a classical interpretation of the theme, taking inspiration from Marilyn Monroe with curly cropped blonde hair and a flowing nude ball gown. (The singer used her superstar bargaining power with the designer, Oscar de la Renta, only agreeing to wear the dress if he promised to stop using animal fur in his future designs.)

Fashion, and the Met Gala itself, has long been a means of making a political statement. In 2016 Madonna hit back at critics by defending her bondage-inspired Givenchy outfit with exposed breasts as “a political statement” on female liberation. This year, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) attended in a white dress created by the designer Aurora James, inscribed with the text “TAX THE RICH” in large red letters. Critics have pointed out the irony in wearing this message whilst attending a $35,000 ticketed event that celebrates the rich and famous. Defenders have pointed to the history of performative politics in America, thus adhering to the dress code through the irony of the setting versus the statement. Meanwhile, British model Cara Delevigne wore a white bulletproof vest emblazoned with the phrase “Peg the Patriarchy,” which no one has been able to find a suitable defence for. 

The perhaps most unexpected outfit of the night came from Kim Kardashian who wore a head-to-toe black bodysuit that covered her face, designed by Demna Gvasalia, the creative director of Balenciaga. Whilst a puzzling choice at first, the outfit, which reduces her to a silhouette, is thought to represent her place in American popular culture as an iconic body shape, erasing the relevance of her other features in the process.

Other interpretations of the theme include supermodel Kendall Jenner’s Givenchy diamond-encrusted sheer dress inspired by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Rihanna’s Balenciaga draping black ensemble finished with a black beanie, referencing American streetwear, Amanda Gorman’s Vera Wang take on the Statue of Liberty, Debby Harry’s Zac Posen nod to the American flag and Leon Bridges, the Colombian singer Maluma and J-Lo all wearing Western cowboy themed outfits. 

With the co-chairs of the event being Billie Eilish (19 and the youngest yet), Naomi Osaka (23), Timothee Chalamet (25) and Amanda Gorman (23), this was also a year of celebrating Gen-Z talent in the celebrity world. For the first time, TikTok and YouTube stars like Addison Rae, Dixie D’Amelio and Emma Chamberlain attended the prestigious event – much to the disdain of some of the fashion world – exemplifying the new boundaries of celebrity for the younger generation. And, to top off her life-changing week, US Open tennis champion, Emma Raducanu, attended the Gala in a black and white Chanel ensemble. 

Next year’s theme will have designers scrambling to create something different for the typical roster of celebrities, trying to distinguish “lexicon” from “anthology”, with only eight months to do so. We’ll be waiting at home, in our pyjamas or activewear, ready to brutally critique them.