The Met Gala Explained: The Costume Institute Behind Fashion's Big Night

Each spring, one evening on the steps of a New York museum produces more fashion coverage than almost any runway show. The Met Gala has become shorthand for spectacle, but behind the red carpet is something more lasting: a museum department dedicated to the history of dress, and an exhibition that thousands of visitors will walk through in the months that follow.

What the Met Gala actually is

The event's formal name is the Costume Institute Benefit. It is a fundraising gala for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it celebrates the opening of the department's major spring exhibition.

Unlike most curatorial departments at the Met, the Costume Institute is responsible for funding its own operations, including exhibitions, acquisitions and conservation. The benefit is its primary source of that funding. In other words, the gala's glamour pays for the scholarly work of preserving and studying fashion.

The Costume Institute: a short history

The Costume Institute's origins lie in the Museum of Costume Art, founded in New York in the 1930s by a group of theater designers and patrons who wanted a collection of historical dress for study and inspiration. In 1946, it merged with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and became the Costume Institute.

Over the decades, its collection has grown to encompass tens of thousands of garments and accessories spanning several centuries and five continents. In 2009, the Brooklyn Museum transferred its own important costume collection to the Met, creating a joint collection that significantly expanded holdings of American and European fashion.

In 2014, the department's renovated galleries reopened as the Anna Wintour Costume Center, named in recognition of the longtime chair of the benefit.

How the gala began

The first benefit was organized in 1948 by Eleanor Lambert, the influential American fashion publicist who also created the International Best-Dressed List and helped found New York's organized fashion week. Early benefits were relatively modest society dinners held at various venues, intended to support the new department.

The event changed character in the 1970s. Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, became a special consultant to the Costume Institute in 1972. She staged dramatic, theatrical exhibitions on themes such as historic costume and the work of individual designers, and the benefit grew in prestige alongside them.

From the mid-1990s, Anna Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue, became closely identified with the gala, chairing it for most years since and transforming it into the global media event it is today. The guest list now mixes fashion designers, artists, performers, athletes and business figures, and co-chairs are announced each year.

Themes and dress codes

Each year's gala takes its theme from the spring exhibition, which the Costume Institute's curators develop over a long period. Exhibitions have ranged from surveys of individual designers to broad explorations of ideas, such as fashion and technology, camp, religious imagery, or American style.

Guests receive a dress code connected to the theme. How closely they follow it varies widely, and the debate over who "understood the theme" has become part of the event's public life. Many attendees wear custom pieces made by designers specifically for the night, often developed over months.

It helps to keep a distinction in mind:

Why the exhibitions matter

The Costume Institute's exhibitions are serious scholarly projects, usually accompanied by research catalogs. They have helped establish fashion as a legitimate subject for art museums. Several have been among the most visited exhibitions in the Met's history, attracting audiences who might not otherwise visit an art museum.

The exhibitions also influence how designers and the public think about clothes. By placing garments in historical or conceptual context, they show fashion as an art form connected to politics, religion, technology and identity, not simply as commerce.

Exhibitions that shaped the conversation

A few Costume Institute shows of the past two decades illustrate the range:

• "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" (2011) celebrated the late British designer and drew lines of visitors that stretched through the museum, becoming one of the most popular exhibitions in the Met's history at the time.
• "China: Through the Looking Glass" (2015) explored Western fashion's long fascination with Chinese art and dress, and the questions of influence and appropriation that come with it.
• "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" (2018) spread across the Met's Fifth Avenue building and The Met Cloisters and became the most visited exhibition in the museum's history.
• "Camp: Notes on Fashion" (2019) took its starting point from Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" and examined exaggeration, irony and theatricality in dress.
• "In America" (2021 and 2022) was a two-part exhibition on American fashion, which split the usual calendar after the pandemic delayed the gala to September 2021.

Each one shows the same pattern: a serious curatorial idea, made public through one very visible night.

The gala in popular culture

The gala's influence now reaches well beyond the guest list. Red-carpet arrivals are broadcast and live-streamed, analyzed on social media and dissected the following morning. Documentaries have followed the planning of the exhibitions and the event, and the gala has appeared in films and television.

Its rules are part of the mystique: the event has been known for restrictions such as limits on phone use and social media posting inside, reinforcing its exclusivity.

How to experience it yourself

You do not need an invitation to enjoy what the gala supports.

1. Visit the exhibition. The spring show opens to the public shortly after the gala and typically runs for several months. Check the Met's website for dates and timed-entry details.
2. Explore the collection online. The Met's online collection includes many Costume Institute objects with photographs and descriptions.
3. Read the catalog. Exhibition catalogs are often richly illustrated and written by leading fashion historians.
4. Visit other fashion museums. In New York, the Museum at FIT presents fashion exhibitions with free admission, and museums across the US hold notable costume and textile collections.

The bigger picture

Strip away the cameras and the Met Gala is a fundraiser for a department that treats clothes as history. That combination of spectacle and scholarship is what makes it unique: for one night, fashion is a show; for the rest of the year, it is a collection to be studied, preserved and shared.