The Met Gala

In a city that lives and breathes both fashion and high-culture, there is perhaps no single event that combines both of them like the Met Gala. This annual event (held on the first Monday of May each year) is essentially a fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute of New York City, but because of all the high-profile names that attend the event, it has become more than just a fundraising event and instead a culturally significant culmination of all the world’s most famous celebrities wearing the most cutting-edge fashion.

The Met Gala is used to mark the opening of the Costume Institute’s annual fashion exhibit, and to fittingly mark each year’s opening, the Met Gala releases a “theme” that sets the tone for what to wear for the night. For example, this past year’s theme was “Camp: Notes on Fashion”, which is not exactly a clear theme to most people. I’ll admit that I’m not the most fashionable person around, so I was like many people who immediately though that “camp” had something to do with sleeping bags and campfires and the like. But really, what “camp” referred to was exaggerated fashion.

And the celebrities who attended the Met Gala this year certainly didn’t disappoint when it came to showing off exaggerated fashion trends. For example, Kylie and Kendall Jenner were dressed in seemingly matching purple and orange gowns (with Kyle actually sporting purple hair to match her purple attire). They actually looked super fabulous, although arguably they were not particularly “exaggerated” in their sense of fashion with those outfits.

Cardi B took it a step further with an enormous maroon gown that extended a few feet behind her as she walked. The fact that the dress took up so much space behind her and had the finishing touch of countless matching maroon feathers at the very end of the dress made the dress all the more exaggerated overall, which again was the entire point of this year’s theme.

Lady Gaga even went so far as to wear four separate outfits that night. The outfits included a pink gown, a black gown, a pink dress (with a giant cell phone to top the look off), as well as a fierce black lingerie outfit. Although each outfit was relatively exaggerated in their own right, the sheer fact that she went through the trouble of wearing multiple outfits all in a single night only further strengthened the sense of exaggeration that she was trying to portray.

And there were a lot more other amazing outfits at this year’s Met Gala – frankly too many to count. But in reality, that is just the norm for Met Gala events each and every year. With celebrities and high-profile members of the fashion industry gathering in New York City every year to party and showcase the latest and greatest in fashion, the Met Gala is truly one of the premier fashion events in the entire world.