The Met Gala 2020 Theme Revealed — and Meryl Streep's Going to Co-Chair for the First Time Ever
Fashion fans, wait not more! The 2020 Met Gala had been revealed and it’s “About Time: Fashion and Duration”!
News of the theme was announced on Wednesday.
The New York Times describes it as “inspired in part by the novels of Virginia Woolf and the theories of the early-20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose admittedly somewhat obscure but also important musings on time posited it as a constantly mutating stream rather than a series of discrete moments.”
“I wanted to do an exhibition focused on the collection, but not a traditional masterworks exhibition,” Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Andrew Bolton told the outlet. “Something that connects to the zeitgeist, and what people are talking about now.”
Next year marks the 150th anniversary of fashion’s biggest night. The 2020 Gala will take place on May 7, and showcase 160 women’s fashion pieces from the last century and a half and more.
“Fashion is indelibly connected to time,” Bolton added of the decided-upon theme. “It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times.”
On the chair committee this year? Louis Vutton artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, Anna Wintour, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emma Stone — and in her first-ever attendance at the Met Gala, Meryl Streep.
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The event’s theme this past year was “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” inspired by Susan Sontag‘s 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” which describes camp as “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
Celebrities like Billy Porter, Zendaya and the Kardashian-Jenner sisters went all out, with Porter arriving at the event on a litter carried by six shirtless men wearing shiny gold pants and headpieces.
Kylie Jenner looked stunning in her custom Versace ensemble, wearing head-to-toe lilac with a see-through, mermaid-esque dress, fur stole and perfectly purple wig. Her look was so iconic that her daughter Stormi, 21 months, even recreated it for Halloween this year!
Posing alongside her sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner, Kim Kardashian West rocked a skintight custom “wet, dripping” Mugler dress at the Gala, with water-like crystal droplets capturing the flash perfectly on the red carpet.
Meanwhile, Streep will next be on the big screen as Aunt March in Little Women. The Hollywood legend is starring in the project alongside Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern and Timothée Chalamet.
During a visit to The Ellen DeGeneres Show last week, Ronan, 25, explained that she made sure to stay calm while working with Streep, 70, in the movie despite being starstruck by the three-time Oscar winner.
“I was like, ‘It’s going to be great and it’s going to be lovely to have this one scene with her’ and it was,” she said. “We did it and I kind of kept my cool because I had to and we needed to make sure the scene was just right.”
But once Ronan and Streep’s scene came to an end, the Lady Bird star felt she could freely fangirl out: “When they called ‘Cut’ on the last setup and they were going to check it and move on, suddenly I was like, ‘Oh my God, I got to work with Meryl Streep,’ and it all sort of hit me then.”
