On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, assembled at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They entered the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remained entirely out of sight of the public’s gaze, so that all we saw was the arrival of the beautiful and wealthy. This is the Met Gala, and for an event that is theoretically just for fashion nerds and doesn’t even get televised inside, it has a remarkable cultural cachet.

The Gala, which falls on the first Monday of May, purportedly celebrates the Anna Wintour Costume Center’s keystone exhibit every year. It’s overseen by the Center’s eponymous queen: Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. This year, the exhibit is called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” and features some of the museum’s oldest and most fragile garments. Guests have accordingly been asked to follow the dress code “Garden of Time,” after a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, with moody florals, clock motifs, and even outstanding archival pieces all expected to fit the theme.

Stars like Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, Kim Kardashian, and Cardi B were all in attendance — even as exploding protests over the war in Gaza and a just-averted strike by Condé Nast workers threatened to cast a shadow on the rarefied gathering.

When the Met Gala was first instituted in 1948, it would not have boasted such an A-list roster of guests, nor such a trendy corporate sponsor (albeit one currently in crisis). The Gala has always been glamorous, but it used to be a local event, primarily a showcase for the society ladies of the Upper East Side. It took decades of careful strategizing and alliance-building with Hollywood to make the Met Gala the pop cultural phenomenon it is today.

Now, the Met Gala shines because it is an unparalleled occasion for celebrity image-building. It is a showcase for both the illusion of accessibility and unreachable glamour at the heart of modern celebrity.

Here’s how it got there.

How the Met Gala went from midnight supper to opium-scented art show to celebrity showcase

The Met’s Costume Institute was born out of the Museum of Costume Art, a library devoted to the art of theatrical costumes. In 1946, Lord & Taylor president Dorothy Shaver decided to bring the collection to the Met. Fashion, she felt, needed the cultural power that comes from allying with a major museum. It needed its history preserved and its present recognized to be respected as a major and vital art form. The Met agreed to take the collection — with the caveat that the American fashion industry would be responsible for raising the funds for the........

© Vox