With the “Garden of Time” as inspiration, celebrities flocked to the Metropolitan Museum gala on Monday, the unmissable New York event at the crossroads of fashion, popular culture and philanthropy.
Dark suit with highlighted seams and large hat evoking the Tudor era, the prince of reggaeton Bad Bunny set the tone, black floral bouquet in hand, when he walked the steps of the prestigious museum backing onto Central Park. Actress Zendaya, dressed as the Puerto Rican artist by John Galliano (Maison Margelia), appeared in a bias-cut dress in electric blue and emerald tones, veil and delicate feather on the head. Then we saw her again in another look, a dress with a long black train and a hat overflowing with roses.
Zendaya, 27, and Bad Bunny, 30, co-chaired the evening, along with Jennifer Lopez, whose transparent and sparkling Schiaparelli dress outlined wings, Marvel actor Chris Hemsworth and the high priestess of event, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Sands of time
During the evening, a few hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators approached the famous 5th avenue where the museum stands, shouting “long live Palestine“. The police, who arrested several people, kept them at a distance behind barriers, noted AFP journalists. Behind other barriers, hundreds of fans tried to see the celebrities. Some probably disappointed because Rihanna , one of the most anticipated, did not show up.
With the theme of “sleeping beauties“, and as a dress code the “Garden of Time“, an allusion to a short story by science fiction writer JG Ballard about ephemeral beauty, the creations focused on nature.
Flowers were everywhere. Embroidered, in the shapes of ruffles, on the trains of dresses, in ornaments, we have seen them on the actress Uma Thurman, the rapper Nicki Minaj, the singers Erykah Badu, Camila Cabello, or the most listened to French-speaking artist in the world, Aya Nakamura, platinum blonde hair and shiny, sensual dress. The French singer also participated in her first Met Gala. French influencer Léna Situations also posed for photographers this year.
South African singer Tyla’s strapless Balmain dress, evocative of the sands of time – right down to the hourglass accessory – was sculpted so closely to her body that she had to be carried up the steps.
TikTok and AI
For extravagance, we could count on Lana Del Rey, whose dark branches rising on her dress held a canopy-shaped tulle veil above her head. Or on the rapper Cardi B, whose train required nine porters in tuxedos. She compared it to a “black Rose“. The carpet was also walked by the boss of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, whose video application ultra-popular with young people, but in the sights of the American authorities, is sponsoring the evening.
The purpose of the Met Gala is to finance the fashion department of the prestigious museum, “The Costume Institute“. According to the New York Times, the place at the dinner this year costs 75,000 dollars, an entire table 350,000 and the previous edition brought in some 22 million dollars. The event, which is held on the first Monday in May and accompanies the opening of the great annual exhibition of the “Costume Institute”, unveiled to the press in the morning.
The Met leveraged technology this year to “wake” his “sleeping beauties“, in other words the most precious, original and sometimes fragile pieces from an extraordinary collection of 33,000 items of clothing and accessories recounting several centuries of fashion history.
Like this satin silk ball gown adorned with embroidery and embellished with chiffon from the house of Worth which can no longer be dressed on a mannequin. The 1887 piece is shown flat, but it has also been reconstructed in computer-generated images and comes to life again, with ruffles deployed, in the form of a hologram. Throughout the pieces, immersion is achieved through noises, those of an Alexander McQueen dress made entirely of shells, the sounds of which have been recreated.
But also through smells, like that of menthol cigarettes exhaling from a mid-20th century hat. To achieve this, the odorous molecules were isolated through an extraction process and reproduced in tubes that the visitor can smell. The museum also collaborated with generative artificial intelligence specialist OpenAI to allow visitors to chat with 20th-century New York socialite, Natalie Potter, about the impressive cathedral-train dress she wore on the day of his marriage on December 4, 1930.
Met Gala 2024
