The Met Gala began life as a $50-a-ticket midnight dinner at the Waldorf Astoria — a far cry from the $100,000-a-seat event it's become today. It's held every year on the first Monday in May, marking the opening of the Costume Institute's spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it remains one of the most exclusive nights in fashion despite the fact that anyone can watch the red carpet unfold live. Click the green Configure button and set how far ahead you'd like to be alerted.
A fundraiser before it was a spectacle
Fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert founded the event in 1948 to support the newly created Costume Institute, dubbing it "The Party of the Year" — but for its first couple of decades it stayed a relatively contained New York society dinner, with no themed dress code at all. The shift toward what we'd recognize today began in 1972, when former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland joined as a consultant and introduced exhibition-tied themes, starting with a 1973 Cristóbal Balenciaga retrospective.
Anna Wintour's three decades of control
Since taking over as chair in 1995, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has overseen nearly every detail of the night — guest list approval, the menu (no parsley, garlic, or onion, reportedly to avoid bad breath or food stuck in teeth on camera), and even attire vetting in advance. Every attendee needs her sign-off, regardless of how famous they are; in 2017, sitting US President Donald Trump became the first celebrity ever publicly banned from the event despite having attended for nearly a decade prior.
The numbers behind fashion's biggest night
A single ticket now costs $100,000, with full tables running well into seven figures. Despite that price tag, the event isn't really about ticket revenue alone — it's the Costume Institute's main source of annual funding, having raised over $30 million in a single year recently and surpassed $200 million in total contributions since Wintour took over.
Worth knowing
Themes are chosen roughly a year in advance and must work their way through several layers of approval — the Costume Institute's curator proposes one, the museum's leadership signs off, and Wintour gives final approval — with the explicit goal, in the curator's own words, of generating "some type of controversy and debate," which is exactly what several past themes have done.
So whether you're tracking the red carpet livestream or just want to catch the theme reveal, click that green Configure button and let the date come to you.