The Metropolitan Museum of Art have announced that the annual high-wattage celebration of both fashion and celebrity Met Gala which was cancelled last year because of the pandemic, will return in person, first in September, then again in 2022 in its usual slot of the first Monday in May.
The galas are set to consist of a “more intimate” version September 13 of this year and a larger one on May 2, 2022 and they will launch a two-part exhibition at the museum based on a survey of American fashion. The exhibition will be on view for almost a year.
The museum said, that ‘In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,’ opening September 18, will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the museum’s Costume Institute and “explore a modern vocabulary of American fashion.”
Part two, ‘In America: An Anthology of Fashion,’ will open in the museum’s popular American Wing period rooms on May 5, 2022, and will explore American fashion, with collaborations with film directors, by “presenting narratives that relate to the complex and layered histories of those spaces.”
Both parts will close on September 5, 2022.
There was no immediate word on who the celebrity hosts, or chairs, would be for the galas. The event traditionally features a heady mix of luminaries from fashion, music, film, TV, sports and other arenas.
The first gala in September will be smaller and held in accordance with government coronavirus guidelines. The second next May is intended to be larger, in line with previous galas which typically hold about 550 guests. The gala is a major fundraiser, providing the Costume Institute with its primary source of funding. In 2020, the gala was cancelled but fans were invited to engage in a social media challenge to recreate favourite red-carpet looks.
“Fashion is both a harbinger of cultural shifts and a record of the forces, beliefs, and events that shape our lives. 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,” Max Hollein, director of the Met, said in a statement.