The Theme for This Year's Met Gala Has Been Announced
Fashion

The Theme for This Year's Met Gala Has Been Announced

After being canceled last year due to the pandemic, the Met Gala is officially back on for 2021 albeit with some slight modifications.

Fashion's biggest night, which usually takes place on the first Monday in May, will instead be held on September 13, 2021 "pending government guidelines," the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced this morning in a press release. It will also be a more "intimate" affair than previous years, according to the museum.

The benefit will mark the opening of this year's next major fashion exhibit, which will actually be a two-part show. The first, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, will open to the public on September 18, 2021 will celebrate The Costume Institute's 75th anniversary and explore a "modern vocabulary of American fashion."

The second, In America: An Anthology of Fashion, will open on May 2, 2022 in the museum's American Wing period rooms and will explore the development of American fashion by "presenting narratives that relate to the complex and layered histories of those spaces." Both exhibits will close on September 5, 2022. There will also be a Part 2 of the Met Gala, presumably a larger and more splashy event, on May 2, 2022. While the dress code for both Met Galas hasn't yet officially been announced, it will undoubtedly be tied in someway to American fashion.

"Fashion is both a harbinger of cultural shifts and a record of the forces, beliefs, and events that shape our lives," said Max Hollein, the Marina Kellen French Director of The Met, in a statement. "This two-part exhibition will consider how fashion reflects evolving notions of identity in America and will explore a multitude of perspectives through presentations that speak to some of the complexities of history with powerful immediacy. In looking at the past through this lens, we can consider the aesthetic and cultural impact of fashion on historical aspects of American life."

Photo courtesy of Getty