This Year’s Met Gala Co-Chairs Have Been Announced, And The Theme Is “Gilded Glamour”
The Met Gala usually happens on the first Monday in May every year, but things got messy when COVID hit back in 2020. The 2020 Met Gala, the theme of which was “About Time,” was quickly canceled. The 2021 Met Gala was postponed, and later held four months later in September, the theme being “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.” But the 2022 Met Gala is returning to its traditional spot on the first Monday in May, and it’s pretty clear Anna Wintour has an HBO Max subscription because this year’s theme is “Gilded Glamour.” I can practically hear Christine Baranski’s snobby old Agnes van Rhijn whispering to her sister Ada, “How nice for the new money set to have such an opportunity to show off what they recently purchased from Montgomery Ward.”
The official long-form theme of this year’s events is “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” which sounds 100% more boring than “Gilded Glamour.” According to Vogue, the theme was picked as a Part 2 to last year’s events, and will focus on, “the vitality and diversity of contemporary American fashion.”
Whereas “Lexicon” offers an expansive look, “Anthology” gets specific, delving into the usually overlooked backbone of American style. “The stories really reflect the evolution of American style, but they also explore the work of individual tailors, dress-makers, and designers,” says Bolton. “What’s exciting for me is that some of the names will be very familiar to students of fashion like Charles James, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta, but a lot of the other names really have been forgotten, overlooked or relegated into the footnotes of fashion history. So one of the main intentions of the exhibition is to spotlight the talents and contributions of these individuals, and many of them are women.”
As for the event’s co-chairs, they include Tom Ford and head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, as well as this year’s celebrity co-chairs Regina King, American Vogue’s personal favorite Blake Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Because the “Gilded Glamour” theme spans a number of periods, it could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Sarah Jessica Parker could show up in a swan-bill corset, carrying a dusty old parasol with a series of palm-sized silk flowers in a bouffant held up with two cans of hairspray and a pound of dry shampoo. And you know Katy Perry will take it way too literally and roll onto the red carpet dressed as a six-foot-tall gold-leafed copy of a Glamour magazine with a hole cut out in the middle for her face.
Pic: HBO