Met Gala: it’s not just fashion- it’s art.
“Zendaya at the Met” digital art, 2024.
Every year on the first Monday of May onlookers globally can experience fashion fantasies playing out on the steps of New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art aka the Met Gala. Headed by it-queen of fashion and longtime editor-in-chief of Vogue Magazine Anna Wintour, the Met Gala is the one time a year phenomenon where art and fashion become one.
To designers and stylists everywhere, there is no denying that fashion is a form of art, but recently I learned that even the Met Museum itself, doesn’t believe that to be true. “Without the Met Gala, the costumes institute wouldn’t be able to fund itself. It remains the only department at the museum that has to raise its own funding.”
Pictured: Zendaya Met Gala 2024. DIA DIPASUPIL//GETTY IMAGES
As an artist in this world, does it surprise me that arts remain underfunded even at the most elite of levels? Absolutely not, for if anything else were to be true, we wouldn’t have monikered the right of passage as “starving artists” to begin our journeys into art. To me, the Met hosting fashions most prestigious gala, at the museum for the last 50 years and still categorizing costuming as trivial shines a great light on the disparities of the art world.
“If you can’t be better than your competition, just dress better.””
Though we live at a time where anyone can be an artist, a major gap still lies between those who are considered artists who simply make things and artists who are renowned in today's global market. Fashion, like no other form of art, is the most accessible form of art. In a world where a mothers teat peaking in a public setting while she breastfeeds her child is considered outlandish, we can’t escape our absolute need to wake up every single day and get dressed. And although fashion-heads will argue there is a difference between getting dressed and DRESSIN’, is there really a difference if it allows the creator (us) to express themselves how they see fit?
Pictured: Metropolitan Museum of Art
In fact, I would argue that fashion is everyone's first introduction into being an artist. Choosing which colors, textures, shapes make us feel like us, is not so monotonous when we look at it through the inevitable lens of an artist. We know that colors impact our mood, that clothes have the ability to make us feel like a sack of potatoes or like a diamond in the first water. It is our opportunity everyday to create something that will be addressed in this world. What we wear is the first thing people judge us by. How we clothe ourselves therefore becomes the key to who we befriend, where we hang out and what we become.
From custom made sneakerhead culture, to the CHANEL Boutique on Champs-Élysées; fashion is everywhere and fashion by default is the humans most primal form of art. So when we take a step back and look at it all from a bird's eye point of view, it would be obvious to understand why the Met Gala remains the height of the art of design and why each year, us onlookers can’t get enough.
