The Met Gala returns. Actually twice.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Monday that the annual celebration of both fashion and celebrities – canceled last year due to the pandemic – will return in person, first in September and then again in 2022 at the usual place of the first Monday in May.
The galas, a “more intimate” version on September 13 this year and a larger one on May 2, 2022, will launch a two-part exhibition, an overview of American fashion that will be on display for nearly a year.
“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,” the museum said. Part two, ‘In America: An Anthology of Fashion’, will open May 5, 2022 in the museum’s popular period rooms in the Museum’s American Wing and will explore American fashion, with collaborations with film directors, by presenting ‘stories related to on the complex. and layered histories of those spaces. Both volumes will close on September 5, 2022.
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Filmmaker Melina Matsoukas (“Queen & Slim”) has been commissioned to create an open-ended film that can be projected in the galleries, with the content changing during the exhibition.

Lady Gaga attends the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit gala in New York on May 6, 2019. The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Monday that the annual high-wattage celebration of both fashion and celebrities – held almost in 2020 due to the pandemic – will return in person, first in September, and then back on its usual first Monday date. in May.
(Charles Sykes / Invision / AP file)
It was not immediately known who the celebrity hosts, or seats, would be for the galas, traditionally an intoxicating mix of celebrities from fashion, music, film, TV, sports and other arenas. The first gala in September will be smaller and will be held in accordance with government guidelines for coronavirus. The second following May is meant to be larger, in line with previous galas that typically seat about 550 guests.
The gala is a major fundraiser and provides the Costume Institute with the main source of funding. In 2020, the gala was canceled, but fans were invited to take part in a social media challenge to create favorite red carpet looks.
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“Fashion is both a precursor to cultural shifts and a record of the forces, beliefs and events that shape our lives,” Max Hollein, director of the Met, said in a statement. “This two-part exhibition will explore how fashion reflects evolving ideas of identity in America and will explore a multitude of perspectives through presentations that speak with powerful directness about some of the complexities of history.”
As always, the exhibits will be the work of star curator Andrew Bolton. “The pandemic has made connections to our homes more emotional over the past year, as have those to our clothes,” he said in his own statement. “For American fashion, this meant a greater emphasis on sentiment over practicality.”
He said that in keeping with this shift, part one of the exhibition will “establish a modern vocabulary of American fashion based on the expressive qualities of clothing and deeper associations with issues of equality, diversity and inclusion.”
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As for part two, it will “further explore the evolving language of American fashion through a series of collaborations with American film directors that will visualize the unfinished stories inherent in The Met’s period rooms.”
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In addition to Matsoukas, other confirmed collaborators from the film world are cinematographer Bradford Young, whose projects include “Selma” and “When They See Us”; production designers Nathan Crowley and Shane Valentino; and Franklin Leonard, film director and founder of The Black List, a list of the best non-produced screenplays.