The Metropolitan Museum of Art has named the celebrity co-chairs for its biggest annual fundraising event, the Met Gala, which will take place on 6 May. “Latin Trap” rapper Bad Bunny, multi-hyphenate performer Jennifer Lopez and the actors Chris Hemsworth and Zendaya will preside over the event with its perennial chair Anna Wintour, long-time editor-in-chief of Vogue. The event is sponsored by TikTok, and the platform’s chief executive Shou Chew will serve as the honorary chair next to Loewe’s creative director Jonathan Anderson.
All co-chairs are frequent attendees of the much-anticipated seasonal glamour parade, save Hemsworth, who will attend the event for the first time this year, according to WWD. This gala’s theme this year, “The Garden of Time”, is loosely in keeping with the conceit of the Costume Institute’s upcoming exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion (10 May-2 September), which will feature 250 pieces, some of which are too fragile to be displayed on mannequins.
Curated by Andrew Bolton, Sleeping Beauties will incorporate artificial intelligence, video animation, scents and light projection technologies to achieve an immersive, multi-sensory viewer experience. The show promises to span a vast swathe of styles and eras, including a painfully delicate 17th century Elizabethan bodice and the myriad fashionable reverberations it has cast across time, as well as an 1889 black evening jacquard coat by Charles Frederick Worth.
“The Garden of Time” borrows its name from a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, in which an angry mob draws ever nearer to a countess’s utopian villa. This “fleeting beauty” conceit is sure to inspire flights of floral fancy from attendees. Bolton told Vogue the exhibition will be an ode to the “emotional poetics of fashion”, a fertile starting point for celebrity stylists.
Co-chair Bad Bunny made headlines last year with his Simon Porte Jacquemus-crafted 26ft long train and backless blazer at the Karl Lagerfeld-themed gala, while Zendaya, a mononymic fashion darling, turned heads in Hilfiger haute couture Cinderella at the 2019 gala.
