Anna Wintour Frames Met Gala Launch for What Time Does The Met Gala Start
Anna Wintour marked what time does the met gala start by opening the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute spring exhibition in New York ahead of Monday night’s Met Gala. She called the first Monday in May her “favourite day of the year, and also my most terrifying one,” and the event arrived with fresh controversy over Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s sponsorship.
Costume Art at the Met
The exhibition is titled Costume Art, and it is the first show in the Costume Institute’s new 12,000 sq ft home, the Condé M Nast Galleries, just off the museum’s Great Hall. That move gives fashion a larger physical presence inside one of New York’s biggest cultural institutions, while also placing the show in a space that is three times the size of the institute’s previous basement home.
Andrew Bolton said the idea was to invite viewers to “reconsider longstanding hierarchies” and think about “the dressed body” through the pairing of 200 garments and accessories with 200 artworks from the Met’s collection. Fashion exhibitions at the Met are frequently among the museum’s most visited shows, so the expanded setting is built for traffic as much as display.
13 Thematic Body Types
The show is grouped into 13 thematic body types, beginning with an area devoted to the Naked and Nude body. One pairing puts a Walter van Beirendonck spandex top and leggings with trompe l’oeil male musculature and genitalia beside a Marcantonio Raimondi engraving of Adam and Eve, while statues sit near draped gowns by Y/Project and Di Petsa.
The Abstracted Body section features three Comme des Garçons dresses paired with sculptures by Max Weber, Jean Arp and Henry Moore. Another section, the Corpulent Body, places Michaela Stark’s work beside a Cycladic marble female figure from 4500-4000 BCE and another Stark piece with Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana and Serpent sculpture. That range pulls the exhibition from ancient material to contemporary design without treating either side as decorative filler.
Sinéad Burke Display
Representations of the Disabled Body include a mannequin styled after the campaigner Sinéad Burke, wearing a Burberry trenchcoat modified by photographer Tim Walker to fit her small stature. The mannequin also carries a crown made from the excess fabric chopped off the sleeve, and all of the mannequins in this section are arranged on high podiums that Bolton said were deliberately “pedestalised”.
For readers tracking what happens next, Monday night is the point where the Met Gala turns the exhibition into a live industry test: sponsorship politics, museum ambition and fashion visibility all collide in the same building. The opening suggests the Costume Institute is no longer treated as a basement annex; it now has a space and a show designed to compete with the rest of the Met’s most visited rooms.
