On Monday 6 May, Met Gala co-chairs Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya and Vogue’s Anna Wintour will welcome guests to the museum for an exhibition entitled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”.
The forthcoming show has nothing to do with the Brothers Grimm or Disney, but is rather a celebration of clothing and fashion so fragile that it can’t ever be worn again – and are therefore sleeping beauties in the scrupulously maintained archives of The Costume Institute. (In this analogy, we can consider the Wendy Yu curator in charge of The Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, the Prince for rousing these fashions for a show.)
Per the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we can expect to see a range of fashion on display, dating back as far as a 17th-century Elizabethan-era English bodice, that embodies the beauty of the natural world – its fragility and its inevitable decay. More modern, less delicate pieces imbued with the same spirit as the spotlit fashions will be showcased alongside them, and broken up into three sub-themes: Land, Sea and Sky.
The second part of understanding this year’s dress code of “The Garden of Time”, involves examining its inspiration: a short story of the same title written by JG Ballard in 1962. (The author is perhaps best known for his novel The Empire of the Sun, which was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg.)
The story tells of a Count Axel and his wife, the Countess, in their utopia of leisure, art and beauty. They live in a villa with a terrace that overlooks a garden of crystalline flowers with translucent leaves, gleaming glass-like stems and crystals at the heart of every bloom. Though, as in all of Ballard’s work (“Ballardian”, per contemporary dictionaries, has come to represent “dystopian modernity, bleak artificial landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social, or environmental developments”), there is a dystopian element to their paradise; holding onto it is like trying to keep every grain of a fistful of sand intact in your palm.
Beyond the walls of Count Axel’s villa, an encroaching and chaotic mob draws nearer with every hour. To restore tranquility, the Count must pluck a time-reversing flower from his garden until there are none left. The story ends with the unthinking mob descending on the villa, by now a derelict property with a neglected garden, in which a statue of the Count and his Countess stand entangled in thorny belladonna plants.
But to borrow from TikTok, a sponsor of the gala: “Okay, but what are we wearing?” Let’s break down the many ways to interpret the theme. Boiled down, the dress code, as well as the exhibition, is about fleeting beauty. The most obvious interpretation would be to embrace the “garden” part of “The Garden of Time”. Think melancholic florals (as moody florals aren’t moody enough).
One piece we know is part of the exhibition is a black evening coat by Charles Frederick Worth from 1889, cut from a jacquard textile woven with parrot tulips that, per the Met, have an “aggressive dynamic quality” to them.
For those keen to embrace the floral element of the theme, there were a handful of unapologetically floral fashions seen at last month’s couture collections. Consider a look from Simone Rocha’s couture debut via Jean Paul Gaultier, where models walked with silver-dipped roses in their hands – as if Rocha knew this theme was coming. Or look 36 from Giambattista Valli would work well, with its melodramatic impressionistic sequined florals.
Beyond the most recent season, there’s Karl Lagerfeld’s flower-embellished pieces from Chanel’s Spring 2015 Couture collection, which was set in a garden that mechanically bloomed – very Ballardian. We’d even encourage looks with real-life flowers, rotting preferably. Essentially, guests should set out to look like a walking memento mori while ascending the Met steps.
One could look to the non-floral clues in Ballard’s text, too. Though destruction looms, the Countess plays Mozart and Bach on her harpsichord, which would make the musical note look from Valentino Spring 2014 incredibly fitting. And for those who want to follow the text faithfully, Count Axel is described as wearing black velvet and a silk cravat.
Time – the reversal of it and our powerlessness over it – is another theme to explore. Someone could wear Cartier’s Salvador Dalí-inspired Crash timepiece on their wrist. Or, for a camp take (and a wink to a previous Met Gala theme), Moschino’s grandfather clock gown from autumn/winter 2022.
Alternatively, gala-goers could put Ballard’s tale aside and dive into the exhibition itself, which celebrates nature in fashion. We know that Loewe’s blurry floral dresses from autumn/winter 2023 are included in the exhibition – any one of those would be lovely. We also know that there are several Alexander McQueen looks in the show, as he was a master of cabinet-of-curiosity-couture. His gown from spring/summer 2001, constructed almost entirely from razor clam shells the designer collected from the beaches of Norfolk, is featured; as is Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen’s monarch butterfly winged minidress. This tells us to go beyond blooms – look at the less obvious incarnations of flora and fauna found in fashion. If we consider the Land, Sea and Sky subthemes, we might put forth fashion inspired by the grain of wood (perhaps a lovely silk moiré?), the pattern of fish scales, or the iridescence of a dragonfly’s wing. Nature gives us so much more than flowers to fawn over.
Finally, there’s the broader concept of the exhibition itself: bygone fashion that deserves attention. Natalie Portman has already worn a recreation of Dior’s Junon gown (which features in the exhibition), so perhaps someone attending with Dior will turn up in Dior’s Venus gown from 1949 (also in “Sleeping Beauties”).
To select an outstanding archival piece, whether a recreation or not, would acknowledge the spirit of an exhibition centred on the passage of time. But while most exhibitions use chronological time as a way to parse objects up into digestible progressions, “Sleeping Beauties” forces the viewer to jump ahead. One day, everything in the exhibition will be too fragile to be worn again.
It’s a dress code that takes some unpacking, but what is the Costume Institute Gala without a bit of cerebral fashion theory?
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