The Costume Institute Benefit, commonly known as Met Gala, revealed Wednesday (Nov. 08, 2023) that the 2024 theme is “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”
The fairytale event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically invites celebrity guests like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, Rihanna and A$AP Rocky, The Kardashian-Jenner family, Anne Hathaway, Jared Leto, Billy Porter and more to kick off the museum’s spring 2024 exhibit. Yet to be announced: the celebrity hosts of the May 6 affair.
The “sleeping beauties” is not inspired by Disney princesses but rather treasured garments in the museum’s collection that are so fragile that they need to be housed in special glass “coffins” rather than on mannequins, curators said. Garments will be displayed in a series of galleries organized by themes of nature.
“Using the natural world as a uniting visual metaphor for the transience of fashion, the show will explore cyclical themes of rebirth and renewal, breathing new life into these storied objects through creative and immersive activations designed to convey the scents, sounds, textures, and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body,” the museum said in a statement.
Curator Andrew Bolton, who masterminds all the Met Gala exhibits, explained that the show includes rare historical garments and contemporary fashions.
“When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably,” Bolton said. “What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled. The exhibition endeavors to reanimate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities.”
The Met Gala is the first Monday in May, as is tradition. The exact date next year is May 6.
The exhibit will be open to the public from May 10 to Sept. 2, 2024.
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