On Monday, May 4, the Met Gala was held in New York, the fundraising dinner organized every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to finance the Costume Institute, the department of the museum dedicated to fashion. It is one of the most observed appointments of the year not so much for the dinner itself, which remains reserved to the guests, but for what happens before: the red carpet on the stairs of the museum, where actresses, musicians, models, athletes and very famous people wear clothes built around a theme. The Met Gala has existed since 1948, but it has become the great pop event we know especially since Anna Wintour, director of Vogue, has taken over it in the nineties.
As always, the theme of the evening was linked to the annual exhibition of the Costume Institute. This year it is entitled “Costume Art” and also inaugurates the new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a permanent space of about 1,100 square meters near the Great Hall of Met: a much more central position than that occupied in the past by the fashion department. The exhibition, curated by Andrew Bolton, puts together clothes and works of art of the museum collection to show how the body dressed is present in many periods and artistic languages, not only in the history of fashion. According to the Met, the route brings together garments and accessories to paintings, sculptures and other objects to tell the relationship between clothes, body and representation.
The dress code chosen for the guests was “Fashion Is Art”, that is “fashion is art”: a formula quite wide to allow almost everything, but consistent with the idea of the exhibition. As often happens at the Met Gala, the theme has become a starting point for very constructed clothes, artistic quotes and more or less legible interpretations. They saw drapes, shaped busts, feathers, rigid silhouettes and references to sculpture, painting and art history. It is an important part of the operation of the gala: the red carpet is used to transform a museum exhibition into a global event, also understandable to those who will never physically visit it.
Among the most famous clothes was Heidi Klum, created by Mike Marino and inspired by the veiled sculptures, including the veiled Christ of Giuseppe Sanmartino, preserved in the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, and the Vestale veiled by Raffaele Monti. Madonna chose a reference to surrealism, citing The Temptations of Saint Anthony. Fragment II by Leonora Carrington. Bad Bunny presented himself as an aged version of himself, with stick and gray hair, while Lisa of Blackpink wore a dress with two three-dimensional arms shaped on her real arms, holding a veil on her head. In some cases the link with the theme was immediate, in other more forced, but also this is part of the Met Gala: every year it produces a kind of great catalog of attempts, some successful and others less.
The evening was also discussed for the involvement of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, main sponsors and honorary presidents of the edition. Bezos did not participate in the traditional photocall on the museum stairs, while Sánchez Bezos was on the red carpet next to Anna Wintour. In the days before the gala, the group of activists Everyone Hates Elon had organized protests and attacks in New York with slogans against what defined the “Bezos Met Gala”; according to Independent, the group also left in the museum hundreds of bottles filled with fake urine and attacked a sticker with Bezos’ face, recalling the accusations made over the years at Amazon on working conditions in the warehouses. The controversy was not only about Bezos, but more generally the relationship between large museums, large private donors and public reputation of billionaires.
Among the most important presences was the return of Beyoncé, who had not participated in the Met Gala for about ten years and was among the official co-presidents of the evening along with Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour.
L’articolo How did this Met Gala go proviene da IlNewyorkese.
