NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the co-chairs for this year’s Costume Institute Benefit, which will be held on May 6 in NYC. The Met Gala is the biggest celebrity and fashion event of the year in the city.
Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Wintour, and Zendaya will serve as co-chairs for the evening. The Benefit takes place annually on the first Monday in May and marks the opening of The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition—this year with the theme, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. The event provides the department with its primary source of funding for annual exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, operations, and capital improvements.
In celebration of this year’s exhibition theme, the dress code for the Benefit will be “The Garden of Time.” Shou Chew, Chief Executive Officer of TikTok, and Jonathan Anderson, Creative Director of LOEWE, will serve as the evening’s honorary chairs.
Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion will reactivate the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum’s collection through first-hand research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies—from cutting-edge tools, artificial intelligence, and computer-generated imagery to traditional formats of x-rays, video animation, light projection, and soundscapes. Approximately 250 objects spanning four centuries will be on view, visually united by iconography related to nature, which will serve as a metaphor for the fragility and ephemerality of fashion.
To date, the Benefit has raised more than $223.5 million for The Costume Institute under the leadership of Met Trustee Anna Wintour. Ms. Wintour, Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast and Global Editorial Director of Vogue, has been a Trustee of The Met since January 1999.
The Costume Institute’s collection comprises over 33,000 objects representing seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories—from the 15th century to the present—for men, women, and children. It began as the Museum of Costume Art, an independent entity formed in 1937. In 1946, it merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as The Costume Institute and became a curatorial department in 1959. In January 2009, the Brooklyn Museum transferred its renowned costume collection to The Met, where it is known as the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The combined collections now constitute the largest and most comprehensive costume collection in the world.
In May 2014, The Costume Institute reopened as the Anna Wintour Costume Center, comprising the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery and the Carl and Iris Barrel Apfel Gallery, with a state-of-the-art costume conservation laboratory, a study/storage facility, and The Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, one of the world’s foremost fashion libraries.
