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On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, will assemble at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They’ll enter the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remains entirely out of sight of the public’s gaze, so that all we see will be the arrival of the beautiful and wealthy.

This is the Met Gala, and for an event that is theoretically just for fashion nerds and doesn’t even get televised inside, it has a remarkable cultural cachet.

The Gala, which falls on the first Monday of May, purportedly celebrates the Anna Wintour Costume Center’s keystone exhibit every year. It’s overseen by the Center’s eponymous queen: Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. 

Wintour notoriously guards the guest list, but Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth are all celebrity co-chairs of the party. And this year, exploding protests over the war in Gaza and a possible strike by Condé Nast workers threaten to cast a shadow on the rarefied gathering. 

When the Met Gala was first instituted in 1948, it would not have boasted such an A-list roster of hosts, nor such a trendy corporate sponsor (albeit one currently in crisis). The Gala has always been glamorous, but it used to be a local event, primarily a showcase for the society ladies of the Upper East Side.

It took decades of careful strategizing and alliance-building with Hollywood to make the Met Gala the pop cultural phenomenon it is today.

Now, the Met Gala shines because it is an unparalleled occasion for celebrity image-building. It is a showcase for both the illusion of accessibility and unreachable glamour at the heart of modern celebrity.

Here’s how it got there.

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The Met’s Costume Institute was born out of the Museum of Costume Art, a library devoted to the art of theatrical costumes. In 1946, Lord & Taylor president Dorothy Shaver decided to bring the collection to the Met. Fashion, she felt, needed the cultural power that comes from allying with a major museum.

The Met agreed to take the collection — with the caveat that the American fashion industry would be responsible for raising the funds for the Costume Institute’s entire annual operating budget. The Met Gala was conceived out of this grim necessity. 

At the time, the party was planned by publicist Eleanor Lambert, and it didn’t even take place at the Met. It was a midnight breakfast hosted at Manhattan institutions like the Waldorf Astoria, Central Park, and the Rainbow Room. It was a glamorous affair, but it was for local society and fashion insiders only.

In 1974, Diana Vreeland arrived at the Met as special consultant for the Costume Institute from Vogue — and brought with her a new edge.

She introduced the concept of linking the gala to an Institute exhibit via a theme, the first one being “The World of Balenciaga.” Her parties were lavish and romantic. “There was evocative music and sometimes even fragrance was pumped into the air,” so that “regardless of the fashions being presented, it always felt like a delicious opium den,” recalled designer Steven Stolman in Town and Country in 2018.

The opium was sometimes close to literal. New York magazine reported in 2005 that Vreeland liked to use a signature perfume in the galleries for each party, and for a 1980 exhibit on China, Vreeland scented the air with the YSL eau de toilette Opium. When guests complained, she explained that the fragrance was needed to create the appropriate air of “languor.”

Along with instituting the iconic theme, Vreeland first brought celebrities to the Met Gala. Under her watch, major popular artists including Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, and Cher rubbed shoulders alongside politicians like Henry Kissinger. 

But it was the woman who took over for a few years at the end of the century — Elizabeth Tilberis, British expat and editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar — who in many ways created the first modern Gala.

Tilberis’s Met Gala was sponsored by Dior, which had just named a newly ascendant John Galliano artistic director. Diana, Princess of Wales, attended that year, fresh off her divorce from now-King Charles, appearing in a Galliano-designed blue satin slip gown. The look caused a sensation.

For Diana, the gown was a piece of image-making that allowed her to make a statement without having to say a word. For Galliano and Dior, it proved their cultural relevancy and their ability to make clothes that spoke for the wearer.

For the Met Gala itself, the moment was a breakthrough. It showed how important the Met could be when it came to both fashion and celebrity: a place where two symbiotic institutions could meet and be celebrated in the best possible light.

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After Tilberis died of cancer in 1999, Anna Wintour took over the Met Gala on a permanent basis. And Anna Wintour understands the value of star power.

She has also always had a canny sense of how closely fashion and celebrity are intertwined, and how much each depends upon the other.

The Met Gala is now the event where celebrities come to reveal a new image or refine an old one, and where the public follows along on the internet with bated breath:

The Met Gala continues to fascinate in part because of the alchemy Wintour has created: an assemblage of dozens of celebrities at the height of their fame, taking full advantage of fashion as an art form for image-making.

Yet at the same time, the Gala remains a highly alluring mystery. Only Vogue is allowed to take photos inside the party, with the occasional highly curated exception (many attendees have made a tradition of bathroom selfies, where we see a Mad Libs-y melange of A-listers that only add to the party’s mystique). The event itself is not televised. It is not livestreamed. It is not accessible to anyone who is not explicitly invited, which includes most of us.

The Gala is thus both highly visible and still a black box — no small feat in an age of overexposure. It allows celebrities to speak to their public without words and then vanish off again into the night, unknowable and unreachable.

—Constance Grady, senior correspondent

Ed Miller/Netflix

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