What to expect from Met Gala 2019

The Met Gala celebrates fashion like no other event. Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour organises the annual event as chair of the Costume Institute. The biggest names in culture and entertainment attend the event each year, from Madonna to Rihanna.

This year Wintour has enlisted the help of Lady Gaga, Serena Williams, Harry Styles and Gucci's Creative Director Alessandro Michele as co-chairs. The highly anticipated event will take place on 6 May 2019 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This Year's Theme

The Met Gala theme is one of the most talked about fashion moments each year. This year's exhibition theme is Camp: Notes on Fashion. It will be interesting to see where designers and celebrities take inspiration from to create their looks. Previous themes include Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, China: Through the Looking Glass and Punk: Chaos to Couture.

The Inspiration Behind the Theme

Curator of the Costume Institute Andrew Bolton decided on the theme based on Susan Sontag's seminal 1964 essay Notes on "Camp". The notes were written for Oscar Wilde. Bolton explained to Vogue, “I felt it would have a lot of cultural resonance,” given the current cultural and political state of the world.

Sontag believed "the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." She sees it as "esoteric", referring to it as "a badge of identity even". She continues "Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content."

According to Sontag's notes, "Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling."

What to Expect from the Red Carpet

The writer mentions various cultural examples of "which are part of the canon of Camp", giving an insight into what to expect on the red carpet. The list includes "women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)", "the old Flash Gordon comics" and the Max Beerbohm novel, Zuleika Dobson.

Bolton has identified the clear admiration this generation has for Camp culture. It "has become increasingly more mainstream in its pluralities — political camp, queer camp, pop camp, the conflation of high and low, the idea that there is no such thing as originality.”

He also notes that designers Marc Jacobs and Yves Saint Laurent have to be "incredibly sophisticated to understand camp." Camp designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Creative Director of Moschino Jeremy Scott and Molly Goddard are rumoured to dress the attendees.