On 6 May 2024, approximately 450 guests ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the 76th annual Met Gala, each paying $75,000 per individual ticket – or $350,000 for a ten-person table – to attend what Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has turned into the single most lucrative fundraiser in the museum world. The evening raised a record-breaking $26 million for the Costume Institute, surpassing the previous year’s total by $4 million, according to the Associated Press. Unlike every other curatorial department at the Met, the Costume Institute receives no allocation from the museum’s general operating budget; the gala is the sole mechanism that funds its acquisitions, exhibitions, and staff salaries.
The Exhibition: Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion
The gala inaugurated Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, which ran from 10 May to 2 September 2024. Curated by Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, the show presented approximately 250 rare garments and accessories spanning four centuries. Bolton organised the pieces around the metaphor of nature – divided into the thematic sections of land, sea, and sky – to illustrate how fashion, like the natural world, moves through cycles of creation, dormancy, and renewal.
The exhibition’s defining concept was the so-called “sleeping beauties” themselves: garments so structurally fragile that they could no longer be placed on standard mannequins or worn by living bodies. These pieces were displayed in specialised glass casings that invited visitors to examine their deterioration at near-microscopic scale. To restore a sense of the life these clothes once possessed, the curatorial team deployed the Pepper’s Ghost optical illusion to demonstrate how an early-twentieth-century hobble skirt restricted movement, while aromatic stations allowed visitors to inhale the scented histories of hats decorated with floral motifs. Embossed gallery walls let visitors touch embroidery patterns replicated from select garments. Sound design, CGI animation, and video projections completed the multisensory environment – a deliberate departure from the static vitrine displays that have long defined costume exhibitions. For more on the exhibition’s themes, see our earlier piece on how the Sleeping Beauties concept awakened fashion’s natural wonders.
The Dress Code: J.G. Ballard’s The Garden of Time
While Sleeping Beauties was the exhibition title, the evening’s official dress code was “The Garden of Time”, drawn from a 1962 short story by the British author J.G. Ballard. First published in the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the tale follows Count Axel and his wife, who inhabit a secluded Palladian villa surrounded by a garden of crystalline flowers. Each time an approaching army of displaced masses threatens their estate, the Count plucks one of these glass-stemmed blooms; it dissolves in a burst of light, rewinding time and pushing the horde back towards the horizon. The solution is inherently temporary. As the flowers are harvested, the garden depletes. When the last bloom is plucked, the mob finally breaches the villa – only to find no trace of the couple, merely two stone statues standing amid the ruins.
Bolton selected the story for its layered commentary on class, temporality, and the futility of preserving beauty against entropy – themes that mapped directly onto the exhibition’s concern with garments too delicate to survive outside conservation. The dress code invited guests to interpret the tension between fleeting splendour and inevitable decay, encouraging designers and stylists to explore botanical motifs, crystalline textures, horology-inspired details, and the broader notion of fashion as a mechanism for manipulating how we experience time. Guests who wanted deeper context for the intersection between high fashion and cultural storytelling could also look to the season’s haute couture collections in Paris, where several maisons had already been exploring nature and fragility on the runway.
The Co-Chairs: Four Performances on the Carpet
Anna Wintour, who has chaired the gala since 1995 and taken sole creative control since 1999, appointed four celebrity co-chairs for 2024: Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth. The honorary chairs were Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, and Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe – a pairing that signalled the gala’s continued courtship of both Silicon Valley capital and conceptual fashion.
Zendaya delivered two distinct red-carpet looks, a rare double entrance. Her primary gown was a custom Maison Margiela creation designed by John Galliano, constructed from sage lamé and iridescent organza and adorned with hand-painted blue and emerald-green grapes and a hummingbird motif. A dramatic plume-like headpiece by the milliner Stephen Jones and custom Tabi pumps by Christian Louboutin for Margiela completed the ensemble. Later in the evening, Zendaya reappeared in a vintage 1996 Givenchy off-the-shoulder black gown with a corseted bodice and sweeping train, topped with a rose-studded Alexander McQueen headpiece – a gesture that directly embodied the exhibition’s thesis of reawakening archival fashion.
Jennifer Lopez wore a custom Schiaparelli Haute Couture gown: a sheer, silver, mermaid-silhouette piece that reportedly required approximately 800 hours of craftsmanship and incorporated some 2.5 million beads. The design featured butterfly motifs – a nod to metamorphosis that resonated with the Garden of Time’s themes of transformation – and was accessorised with Tiffany & Co. jewellery. The gown was the work of Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry, who has made the house synonymous with surrealist spectacle since his appointment in 2019.
Bad Bunny – born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the Puerto Rican artist and the most-streamed musician on Spotify in both 2020 and 2022 – wore a deconstructed custom Maison Margiela navy suit with exposed white stitching and a red stripe running down the trouser leg. His accessories included black leather gloves, steampunk-inflected sunglasses, a bullfighter-inspired hat, fur-embellished Tabi shoes, and a fresh floral arrangement carried in hand. The ensemble’s deliberate rawness – visible seams, unfinished edges – spoke to the exhibition’s preoccupation with garments that reveal their construction as they age.
Chris Hemsworth, making his Met Gala debut, wore a cream three-piece Tom Ford suit – restrained by the evening’s standards, but precisely calibrated. He was accompanied by his wife, Elsa Pataky, who wore a gold gown with a floral headpiece. Hemsworth’s understated elegance served as a visual counterpoint to the maximalist interpretations elsewhere on the carpet, echoing the quiet dignity of Count Axel before the garden’s final bloom.
Bolton’s Curatorial Arc and the Gala’s Cultural Weight
The 2024 theme continued a pattern Bolton has established over more than a decade of pairing literary and conceptual source material with fashion exhibition-making. Previous themes have drawn on the Catholic imagination (Heavenly Bodies, 2018), the American identity (In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, 2021), and the technology of fashion (Manus x Machina, 2016). Ballard’s story marked the first time a specific work of British science fiction served as the gala’s conceptual anchor.
The Costume Institute’s reliance on the gala for its entire operating budget – a structure unique among the Met’s seventeen curatorial departments – means that the event’s cultural programming carries genuine institutional stakes. The 2024 gala’s $26 million haul funds not only exhibitions but also the conservation work that keeps pieces like those in Sleeping Beauties from disintegrating entirely. In that sense, the gala’s spectacle and the exhibition’s scholarship are not separate enterprises; they are interdependent parts of a single financial and creative ecosystem.
For a broader look at what else was shaping the 2024 fashion calendar, see our complete guide to the Met Gala 2024.
What The Garden of Time Revealed About Fashion in 2024
Ballard’s parable – beauty sustained by a dwindling, non-renewable resource – proved a sharper lens than most Met Gala dress codes. In a year when the luxury sector faced slowing growth in China, when Kering reported a 10 per cent revenue decline in its first quarter, and when sustainability pledges from major houses remained largely aspirational, the image of Count Axel plucking his last crystal flower carried an uncomfortable resonance. The guests who climbed the Met’s steps on 6 May were, in one reading, enacting Ballard’s allegory in real time: performing the rituals of an exquisite but unsustainable world, dressed in garments whose creation consumed hundreds of hours and millions of beads, for an institution that cannot fund itself any other way.
That tension – between preservation and consumption, between beauty and its cost – is precisely what made The Garden of Time one of the most intellectually coherent Met Gala themes in recent memory.
