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With Met Gala Postponed, Vogue Takes "Party Of The Year" Online
By
Jen Chung
Published May 4, 2020
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By
Jen Chung
Published May 4, 2020
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Last fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that its big spring 2020 Costume Institute exhibit would be "About Time: Fashion and Duration." The show planned to explore "how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate the past, present, and future," a press release explained—and, of course, the exhibition would be kicked off by the big Met Gala, an event so glamorous and complicated that it takes nearly a year to plan.
But now it's May 4th, 2020, and with New York City in a shutdown until mid-May at the very least, the show's opening has been delayed until October 29th. And there's no starry, over-the-top, head-scratching, "Oh, my, God"-inspiring parade of celebrities, fashion designers, and socialites arriving for the so-called "Party of the Year" on the first Monday in May.
Vogue, whose parent company Conde Nast sponsors the gala, has pivoted instead to a virtual event starting today at 6 p.m. ET, "featuring an address by Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, a special live performance by Florence and the Machine, and a DJ set from Virgil Abloh." Wintour also penned an essay, reflecting on this strange moment:
Today is, of course, the first Monday in May, a day that for me is typically the busiest and the most exciting of the year. But this year, instead of standing on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum welcoming guests to a gala, I’ll be at home like most of you. With all the grief and hardship in this country, the postponement of a party is nothing. And yet, I am sad about it, and I suspect some of you are too (though I have been delighted by those who are marking the occasion in creative ways from home). The Met Gala is the primary source of financial support for the Costume Institute, and it is also a night of incredible inventiveness for the fashion community. Not to see what our most talented designers have dreamed up for this year’s red carpet is a kind of loss. A small one in the scheme of things, I know, but a loss nonetheless.
Over the years, Wintour has turned the party, which raises money for the Costume Institute, into one of the most exclusive events around the world. Tickets, if you can even manage to land an invite, cost $30,000 each (in the 1940s and 1950s, tickets were around $50 a pop).
The Met also shared a video of some memorable recent red carpet moments and a call out on social to media to pay homage to iconic looks with the #metgala challenge:
If you're looking for less official but perhaps even more devoted imaginings of style, check out the hashtag #HFMetGala2020, which is the "High Fashion Twitter" event for tonight. High Fashion Twitter (also known as hft), which was started by a group of 11 young women currently studying everything including aerospace engineering, fashion, and literature, will spotlight their serious fashion followers' ideas. In an interview with the NY Times, one of the organizers, a 20-year-old pre-med student at the University of Maryland, said, "It always felt like fashion and the Met pretty much mirrored each other, but I never felt part of that world. Now I see us as the leaders who will come next, and for us to be so inclusive makes me feel really excited about the future." (hft also contends that #metgalachallenge is copying their efforts.)
As for the official celebration, The Met shared an extended look at what the exhibit will include: 120 pieces paired together to express 60 minutes of time.
Back in November, the exhibit's theme was hard to comprehend, what with talk of a “nuanced and open-ended...reimagining of fashion history that’s fragmented, discontinuous, and heterogeneous." Curator Andrew Bolton told Vogue that he was inspired by a scene in Sally Potter's Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel, "in which Tilda Swinton enters the maze in an 18th century woman’s robe à la Francaise, and as she runs through it her clothes change to mid-19th century dress, and she re-emerges in 1850s England."
Basically, as the museum described, "it will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future," which now feels pretty of the moment, because what is time anyway:
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Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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