The Met Gala 2022 has the theme “In America: An Anthology of Fashion”. This is fashion’s biggest night and has seen celebrities like Lady Gaga or Priyanka Chopra turn heads in statement-making outfits. The Met Gala has also made points in selecting themes like 2019’s Camp – a fashion aesthetic rooted in queer history. 

This year’s theme honours America’s contributions to fashion. Andrew Bolton, head curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, said to Vogue, “The stories really reflect the evolution of American style, but they also explore the work of individual tailors, dress-makers, and designers”, adding, “What’s exciting for me is that some of the names will be very familiar to students of fashion, like Charles James, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta, but a lot of the other names really have been forgotten, overlooked, or relegated into the footnotes of fashion history. So one of the main intentions of the exhibition is to spotlight the talents and contributions of these individuals, and many of them are women”. 

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Also known as Gilded Glamour, this theme will see celebrities put on extravagant ensembles, and have a hint of period drama. The idea of Gilded Glamour stems from the Gilded Age, which came due to a push from industrialization and European immigration that saw America enter a boom period in the 19th and 20th centuries. The poor lived in abject poverty while the rich lived opulently. 

A good pop-cultural marker would be ‘The Great Gatsby’. The Gilded Age is the period before the events in the F Scott Fitzgerald novel. 

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Fashion from that time usually included frilled hems, corsets, and billowing gowns. The Met Gala 2022 also has a white tie dress code, which means attendees have to adhere to the dress code in the strictest sense and actually have to wear a white tie as well.