2024 Met Gala: Everything to know about fashion's annual soiree

Fashion's biggest night out — hosted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York each year on the first Monday of May — is both a forever-evolving spectacle and a carefully crafted event.

Fashion’s biggest night out — hosted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York each year on the first Monday of May — is both a forever-evolving spectacle and a carefully crafted event. A parade of A-Listers dress according to the theme inspired by the Costume Institute’s latest exhibition (some more than others) and walk the steps up to the museum before disappearing inside to enjoy the galleries, dinner and drinks.

The Met Gala is taking place on Monday night and it’s time to place your bets: Which showstopping archival piece will Zendaya wear? Who will pull off the most uncanny stunt, topping Jared Leto’s “twin” or Doja Cat’s feline prosthetics? Inside, which celebs will flout the no-photos rule to sneak bathroom selfies? How late will Rihanna show up?

This year, the theme for the red carpet is “The Garden of Time,” referencing a 1962 short story of the same name by British author J.G. Ballard. Like the New Wave sci-fi story, which takes place in a garden of time-bending florals, the museum’s exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” highlights connections between nature and technology, using AI, CGI and other tools to breathe new life into hundreds of fragile archival pieces spanning hundreds of years. The theme is chosen each year by Andrew Bolton, curator-in-charge at the Costume Institute.

Expect fantastical fashion with floral and sci-fi motifs on the red carpet, and stylists working with luxury houses to resurface famous older looks. The first celebrities to appear will be Gala co-chairs Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth, the last of whom is making his Met Gala debut.

A frenzy of A-List arrivals and photographs, the red carpet portion of the evening’s proceedings last for a few hours, but that’s the only part the public sees. Inside, guests tour the exhibition, which opens to the public in the days following the gala, and have a seated dinner. Phones at the table are discouraged, and the seating chart is carefully crafted by American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who has organized the gala since 1995. (Wintour has “final say” over every guest in attendance, the New York Times has previously reported.)

Though the red-carpet and afterparties get the most attention of the night, the gala is above all, a fundraiser, whose five-figure tickets raise millions of dollars for the museum each year — setting a record at nearly $22 million in 2023, according to the recently-released book “Fashion’s Big Night Out.”