Met Gala 2022: Everything you need to know about this year’s theme

When celebrities take to the red carpet at the Met Gala in New York next Monday, May 2, there will likely be no shortage of corsets and bustiers.

That’s because the dress code for this year’s event, organized by Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Instituteis “Gilded Glamor and White Tie,” referencing the era of American fashion extravagance in the closing decades of the 19th century, when industrialization rapidly amplified the country’s wealth gap.

This Met Gala follows the second part of the Costume Institute exhibition, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion”, launched in September and which set the tone for the looks at last year’s event.

And while there’s apparently always a degree of flexibility when VIP list participants interpret the theme (“What’s more American than a head-to-toe t-shirt?!” Kim Kardashian said of wearing a black Balenciaga look in 2021), this edition will give guests the chance to fulfill their wildest aspirations.

“It was a very exaggerated, very structured period,” fashion historian and curator Kate Strasdin said of the Gilded Age style in a video interview. “It feels so weird compared to the way we think about the dress now.”

The Gilded Age was a 30-year period during which industrialists and real estate magnates saw their fortunes soar to impressive heights thanks to the rapid expansion of trains, factories and urban centers.

Famous family names, including Frick, Astor, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, shaped America’s infrastructure, and socialites of the time, including Caroline Schermerhorn Astor and Alva Vanderbilt, ruled New York society.

For the elite, fashion became top notch, with lace and crystal trim and even bird wings – hatters of the time wore so many feathers, wings and dead birds stuffed into their hats that it culminated in the formation of the Audubon Society, for protection. of birds in 1895, according to the organization.

Underneath their bottom-flattering dresses, American women wore complicated underwear including corsets, padded shoulder pads, bustier pads, crinolines (a structured petticoat shape), and even steel springs to get the right shape, though silhouettes were simplified at the end of the century.

Menswear was also highly formal, with the tuxedo, newly popular in the 1880s, becoming the standard dress for high-ranking gentlemen.

With a focus on American designers at the event, some of them will no doubt rise to the grandeur of the challenge, like Moschino’s Jeremy Scott, whose opulent historical references included sending 18th-century-inspired baskets down the catwalk.

Celebrities can also turn to Christian Siriano or Pyer Moss for their exaggerated, highly structural couture pieces, or recall Alexander McQueen’s vintage designs that used nods to the era, such as caged crinolines. Corsets have already infiltrated the red carpet lately, with Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat and Dua Lipa sporting them at the Grammys last month.

status symbols

During the Gilded Age, you were what you wore, as Strasdin observed. It was the period when the fashion house brand was a new concept. Many American women of the time purchased their status-assuring dresses in Paris from haute couture pioneers: Charles Worth, Jacques Doucet, Paul Poiret and Madame Jeanne Paquin, the last of whom showed her innovative modern designs at the 1900 World’s Fair.

According to Strasdin, American seamstresses would not have their moment until World War I interrupted the supply of European goods to the US.

“American women are really having to travel there, so that’s the first sign of enormous wealth – getting there for exams,” she said. “So it became like Instagram influencers now – (women) would come back with dresses that people knew they had bought in Paris.”

At a time when “old money” mocked “new money” like the Vanderbilts’ newly amassed railroad fortune, it was important to be well connected with European culture.

When Alva Vanderbilt, hoping to be accepted into the upper echelons of society, unleashed a 19th-century rage over her newly completed downtown mansion, dubbed the Petit Chateau, photographs show she wore an elaborate Venetian-style dress intended for to imitate the fashion of the Renaissance era.

Meanwhile, her sister-in-law Alice wore a spectacular dress known as the “electric light” dress from Charles Worth’s House of Worth salon. She paired the look with a hand torch that she raised above her head in a photo posed to resemble the Statue of Liberty.

“The dress itself (had) all sorts of embellishments that were designed to catch the light,” Strasdin said. “And then she had a flashlight that was really cutting-edge at the time. It has gone down in history as one of the iconic outfits of the period.”

corset wars

But even as the fashion pendulum swung toward the formal and elaborate, the underground Aesthetic Movement began encouraging women to shed their corsets in the 1870s, contrary to industrial-age social conventions.

Its bohemian female members wore loose “artsy” dresses in public that were considered shocking for their association with underwear. (Male aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde were also belittled for their so-called feminized tailoring statements.)

While the movement didn’t change public dress codes for women much, the silhouettes caught on quite a bit in the private homes of wealthy women.

Step into romantic leisure wear, the “tea dress” – an elaborate precursor to the viral “snooze dress” of 2020 – although, according to Strasdin, many tea dresses still hid “a chunky boned bodice” beneath the fabric. . Several of these dresses by Adelaide Frick, wife of industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick, reside at The Frick in Pittsburgh, which is home to several Gilded Age designs.

The era’s rich history of tailoring already gained some attention earlier this year with the series “The Golden Age,” which premiered last January on HBO.

The series follows two young women who become involved in the life of New York society, navigating the changing landscape of old and new money. The show’s lead costume designer, Kasia Walicka-Maimone, who has dressed actors Cynthia Nixon, Louisa Jacobson, Denée Benton and Carrie Coon according to their different backgrounds and social aspirations, told Variety in January that her team was “lucky.” to bring the era to the screen.

“It’s a period that gives us a lot to experiment and play with,” she said.

Attendees at this year’s Met Gala may not replicate the exact styles of a century and a half ago, but Strasdin finds the theme appropriate for its resonances today, including the impact of wealthy socialites (who make their fortunes from the influence of the internet rather than factories). steel) for the modernization of fashion houses.

“It will be great to see a nod to all the beautification… And a celebration of that kind of hype,” she said. “With all the exuberance of colors and shapes.”

“And maybe some crazy hats.”