Because fashion is a trillion dollar business, there has been a stubborn, enduring argument that it is more of an industry and a practice than an artistic discipline. It’s a notion that the Met Gala has often challenged by inviting attendees to dare to dress. The truth is that fashion can, at times, be both.
The Met Gala is one of the most watched cultural events every year, and the Costume Institute’s exhibitions are blockbusters in their own right, with some of Bolton’s shows being the most visited in the museum’s history. “Fashion’s acceptance as an art form has really occurred on art’s terms,” Bolton said last year. “It’s premised on the negation, on the renunciation, of the body, and on the [fact that] aesthetics are about disembodied and disinterested contemplation.”
Yet what connects every curatorial department gallery is fashion, or the dressed body, he explained. “It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was, this epiphany: I know that we’ve often been seen as the stepchild, but, in fact, the dressed body is front and center in every gallery you come across. Even the nude is never naked,” he continues. “It’s always inscribed with cultural values and ideas.”
So what should guests wear? The joy in this theme is that there is an abundance of possibilities. Attendees could lean into the idea of nudity, perhaps, and either embrace one of today’s most pervasive trends—the naked dress—or lean more artistic, say with Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli gilded body parts, Thom Browne’s anatomical couture creations, or Glenn Martens’s take on Jean Paul Gaultier’s nude prints.
