NEW YORK (AP) — The worlds of fashion, film, music and sports converge at the massive Met Gala on Monday night with Lady Gaga, Serena Williams and Harry Styles joining Anna Wintour and other A-listers for a stride up the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Wintour, the mastermind behind the annual extravaganza, is also expected to draw Jennifer Lopez, Lupita Nyong’o, Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, Bradley Cooper, and fashion heavyweights Tom Ford, Donatella Versace, Miuccia Prada, Givenchy’s Clare Waight Keller and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele.
For this, the 71st of the fundraising galas, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” is the theme, inspired by a seminal 1964 essay by Susan Sontag in which she describes the phenomenon as something that shan’t be talked about: “To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.”
The crowd could top 600 and has likely been talking about camp for quite some time as guests, Wintour’s co-hosts and the evening’s committee members worked to personalize their fashion spins on the theme. The theme is the basis for the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition.
The evening raises money for the institute, and guests are encouraged to have at the theme each year, to great campy effect in the past. Rihanna showed up for cocktails and dinner in a silvery custom Maison Margiela dress, cape and papal hat to mark last year’s exhibition, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”
If designer Jeremy Scott is the king of camp (his often Warhol-esque designs will be liberally dispersed within the exhibition) then Lady Gaga is the queen. Her pantless custom look with a Versace jacket that evoked a circuit board, her signature ultra-high platform heels and big ’80s hair was a celebration 2016′s “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.”
Camp might as well be her middle name.
Among others expected this year: Chadwick Boseman, Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra, Katy Perry, Kerry Washington, Cam Newton, Venus Williams, Jared Leto, Wendi Murdoch and Ryan Murphy.
