The Met Gala, in Photos

If you are wondering why your social media feeds are awash this morning with culture-shapers of all kinds (actors, athletes, musical artists, politicians) dressed up in the most over-the-top outfits you’ve ever seen, it’s because last night was the Met Gala — also known as the Oscars of the East Coast and the party of the year. Every Gala has a dress code, which is tethered to the exhibition. This year, the show is titled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.” Guests were instructed to dress according to a “Garden of Time” theme, an allusion to a 1962 J.G. Ballard short story.

Yes, there is occasionally something cynical and commercial here. We’ve seen meme-baiting fashions in recent years: Katy Perry costumed as a chandelier, Rihanna as the pope, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a fox in the fabulous henhouse. (She wore a white ball gown with “Tax the Rich” scrawled on the back in 2021.) The famous faces often serve as quasi-advertisements for fashion brands.

All of which makes it easy to forget this is actually an important fund-raiser for one of New York’s cultural pillars: the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. It was once a free-standing museum, but when it merged with the Met in 1946, part of the deal was that the Costume Institute would have to pay for itself. It is the only curatorial department in the museum where that is true. Hence the gala, which raises all the funds for the institute’s operating budget. (Last year, it made $22 million.)

One reason the institute is treated like a sideshow is that it has always been controversial in some quarters to treat fashion as fine art. (Shock! Horror! Clothes with the Kandinsky!) The Costume Institute itself has historically been housed in the museum’s basement — a clear statement about its status at the museum.

But the fashion exhibitions have become more ambitious and more popular as the curator in charge, Andrew Bolton, has focused on the intersection of dress and zeitgeist. He has aimed at themes such as camp, or fashion and Catholicism. Three of the 10 most visited exhibitions in the Met’s history are Costume Institute shows. That has made it harder for the museum to justify its prejudice. Last year, it announced plans to renovate the gift shop into the new costume galleries, meaning those galleries will be among the first any visitor sees.

And that is a reflection of the growing importance of fashion as part of culture, high and low. The gala, with its carefully documented entrances, has simply become everyone’s pass to gleefully render judgment on the game. Feel free to do so yourself: Here are some of the more — well, eye-opening looks from last night.