Everything you need to know about the 2017 Met Gala, the biggest fashion event of the year
As we quickly approach May 1st, the fashion world waits with bated breath for one thing: the Met Gala. Also known as the Super Bowl of the fashion world, the gala is held on the first Monday of May and celebrates the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest exhibit in a wonderful whirlwind of extravagant fashion. Since the exhibit changes each year, so does the gala’s theme — and this year we’re in for a special treat.
The exhibit and theme of this year’s gala is Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. The Japanese designer is the second living designer to have a retrospective at the museum, headed only by the exhibit on Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.
The Met Gala takes place on opening night of the fashion exhibit. The event is in collaboration with Vogue, and it’s a fundraising event for the Anna Wintour Costume Center, which was formerly known as the Costume Institute. It was renamed in honor of Vogue’s editor-in-chief to honor her for her work and dedication to the industry.
Rei Kawakubo is as “anti-fashion” as a fashion designer can be. Her label, Comme des Garçons, is known for its avant-garde approach to style, choosing silhouette and mood over trend and wearability.
Called the “Art of the In-Between,” the exhibition will feature over 150 examples of Rei’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons, from the early ’80s until today. Rei has always pushed boundaries — creating designs that go against the conventional standards of beauty and style — and focuses on the space her designs take up, rather than the glamour they project.
After all, this is the designer who described her Fall 2017 collection as “a way of expressing the notion of un-fabric.”
So, what can we expect from Monday’s Met Gala?
The Met Gala is like the fashion community’s Oscars, and with this year’s theme, we know it’s going to be crazy. Think larger-than-life silhouettes, plenty of unusual fabrics (or non-fabrics), and general risk-taking fashion moments.
It’s also a safe bet that all the celebrities lucky enough to get an invite will be clad in Comme des Garçons — or, at the very least, will be wearing something anti-fashion. We’re crossing our fingers that Kim and Kanye match in fabulously outlandish Rei pieces and that there are a plethora of cutting-edge looks we can fawn over.
To describe the exhibition of Rei’s work, the Met explains,
"The galleries will illustrate the designer's revolutionary experiments in 'in-betweenness' — the space between boundaries. Objects will be organized into eight aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo's work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes. Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness."
Ultimately, Rei created her own corner of the fashion universe, one that’s equally as tantalizing as it is inviting. Her work is unlike anything else we’ve seen at the Met.
The gala will be co-chaired by Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour, with Kawakubo serving as honorary chair. Both the gala and exhibition work together to create the perfect tribute to a woman who changed our perception of fashion.
Now, we can’t wait to see what everyone wears.
