The Met Gala 2024: an idiot's guide to this year's theme, hosts and dress code

The first Monday in May is right around the corner and you know what that means: the 2024 Met Gala is nearly upon us. Of course, London is five hours ahead of New York, so we’ll be watching the first of the outfits drip through to our social media timelines around 11pm. By the time Rihanna hits the red carpet, we will almost certainly be asleep. Unless anyone knows of any Super Bowl-esque watching parties? I’d be game.

Luckily for us, the hosts tend to arrive early, because if there’s one thing Anna Wintour hates, it’s lateness. Lateness and nylon. As such, we’ll get a good look at the outfits of co-hosts Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Chris Hemsworth early-on, as well as the reigning crown princess of the Met, Miss Zendaya Coleman. As for what they’ll be wearing? That’s up to the theme — and whether they stick to it. Here’s everything you need to know about the Met Gala 2024.

The exhibition for 2024 is entitled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.” As is the case every year, guests at the opening night gala (AKA the First Monday in May) are expected to dress in alignment with this exhibition, but there’s also a more direct dress code for the evening.

You might immediately be led towards images of fairytales, as will some of the guests, no doubt, but the sleeping beauties in this theme are the garments set to be displayed. The Met’s exhibition will be centred around 250 “historically significant and aesthetically beautiful” items from 400 years of fashion, all of which are far too fragile ever to be worn again (did you hear that clearly enough, Kim?).

And that’s just the theme. In February, the dress code was more clearly defined (or made even more confusing - depends on how you look at it, really). The Met Gala 2024 dress code is in fact “The Garden of Time,” and focuses on "fleeting beauty,” pointing guests towards florals for inspiration.

The pieces in the 2024 Met Gala exhibit all from the Costume Institute’s permanent collection, some rarely seen before. There is also a twist: the pieces will be brought to life via “cutting-edge curation and technology,” including video animation, light projection, soundscaping, AI and CGI, so they shall go to the 21st Century ball! Nick Knight, the London-based photographer and founder of SHOWstudio, has announced he will be working on the visual presentation on the show, while Norwegian artist Sissel Tolaas, who is known for her work with smells, will develop scents to accompany the installations.

It is a far nerdier theme than 2023’s Met Gala, which honoured the late, great designer Karl Lagerfeld. As such, guests arrived in a sea of Chanel, but also branched out to weirder and wackier takes, see Jared Leto’s gigantic cat costume, in reference to Lagerfeld’s infamous cat, Choupette. Always keen on keeping the Met from feeling Halloween-y, perhaps Wintour is trying to send a subtle “calm down” message with this theme.

Before the Karl Lagerfeld theme, there was two years of tribute to American fashion, entitled “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” then the much-loved “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” which saw Marabou feathers galore, outfits with four different costume changes and Katy Perry as a chandelier. Other recent themes have included “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” in 2018, where Rihanna posited herself as the next-in-line for the Vatican, “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” in 2017 and “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” in 2016. 

In order to score a ticket to fashion’s most prestigious event, you have to be personally selected by Wintour and her panel of co-hosts (yet to be announced). Typically, you cannot bring any extra guests or representation, and the use of social media or smartphone photography inside the event is banned. There are a bunch of other bizarre rules, like no parsley, lest it get stuck in guests’ teeth, no bruschetta, in case it spills, and no onion or garlic, to prevent bouts of bad breath. Despite some surprisingly chic images of stars smoking in the bathroom at previous Met Galas, this is also forbidden, and considered to be disrespectful to the museum.

The Met Gala was initially established by publicist and fashion promoter Eleanor Lambert in 1948, when it was known as the Costume Institute Benefit, however it is now firmly Wintour’s baby. As well as moving it to celebrity-packed event and switching the date from December to the first Monday in May, Wintour has also made the Gala an extremely lucrative affair. Ticket prices for the event originally hovered around $1,000, but by 2016, solo ticket prices to the event cost $25,000, and a table for 10 could be purchased for $250,000, according to a report by WWD.

Basically, it’s the Fort Knox of fashion. But we sure do love to watch it from the sidelines.