Is there a dress code for the Met Gala? What are guests expected to wear?
The annual fashion event’s dress code will be: “The Garden of Time”, taking inspiration from a short story of the same title, written by JG Ballard in 1962.
With May 6 upon us, that means celebrities are gearing up for one of fashion’s biggest nights of the year: the 2024 Met Gala.
Each year, a new theme is introduced for the evening by Anna Wintour for the Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.
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This year, the annual Met Gala is based around the short story ‘The Garden of Time’, in celebration of the Costume Institute’s new exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”
The The Metropolitan Museum say that the exhibit will showcase approximately 250 rare items, with many too fragile to be worn again - they are, according to Vogue, the ‘sleeping beauties’. Many of the garments will be displayed digitally, using AI and CGI to preserve them.
Is there a dress code for the Met Gala?
JG Ballard’s short story explores the concept of preservation using flowers as a symbol of beauty, youth and innocence as well as themes of decay, ruin, beauty and fragility.
How Vogue describes the story of 'The Garden of Time':
The story tells of a Count Axel and his wife, the Countess, in their utopia of leisure, art, and beauty; they live in a villa with a terrace that overlooks a garden of crystalline flowers with translucent leaves, gleaming glass-like stems, and crystals at the heart of every bloom.
Beyond the walls of Count Axel’s villa, an encroaching and chaotic mob draws nearer every hour. To restore tranquility, the Count must pluck a time-reversing flower from his garden until there are none left.
The story ends with the unthinking mob descending onto the villa, now a derelict property with a neglected garden, in which a statue of the Count and his Countess stand entangled in thorny belladonna plants.
What are guests expected to wear?
OK, but what does that mean? Well, Vogue also hand a nice explanation of how guests can turn that story into an outift: they say the best way to do so is by taking the theme of “fleeting beauty” with “the most obvious interpretation would be to embrace the “garden” part of ‘The Garden of Time’”.
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They also add that “we’d even encourage looks with real-life flowers, rotting preferably; essentially, you’ll want to look like a walking memento mori”. Niche, I must say.
Flowers will undoubtedly play a key role at the Met Gala this year, as will time and music. Nature as a whole is encouraged by Vogue to be explored and finally, they mention that “bygone fashion worth our attention” is something that could be a showstopper.
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