To understand the 2024 Met Gala Dress code—announced today as “The Garden of Time”—requires, first, an understanding of this year’s exhibition concept.
On Monday, May 6, Met Gala co-chairs Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya, and Vogue’s Anna Wintour will welcome guests to the museum for an exhibition entitled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”
The forthcoming show has not to do with the Brothers Grimm or Disney, but rather the celebration of clothing and fashion so fragile that it can’t ever be worn again—and are thus sleeping beauties in the scrupulous archives of the Costume Institute. (In this analogy, we can consider the curator in charge of The Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, the Prince for rousing these fashions for a show.)
Per the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we’re to expect a range of fashion on display, which dates back to a 17th-century English Elizabethan-era bodice, that embodies the beauty of the natural world—its fragility and its inevitable decay. More modern, less delicate pieces imbued with the same spirit as the spotlit fashions will be showcased alongside them, and broken up into three sub-themes: Land, Sea, and Sky.
The second part of understanding this year’s dress code of “The Garden of Time,” is to know a bit about its inspiration: a short story of the same title written by J.G. Ballard in 1962. (The author is perhaps most known for his novel The Empire of the Sun, which was adapted into film by Steven Spielberg.)
The story tells of a Count Axel and his wife, the Countess, in their utopia of leisure, art, and beauty; they live in a villa with a terrace that overlooks a garden of crystalline flowers with translucent leaves, gleaming glass-like stems, and crystals at the heart of every bloom. Though, as in all of Ballard’s work (“Ballardian,” per contemporary dictionaries, has come to represent “dystopian modernity, bleak artificial landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social, or environmental developments”), there is a dystopian element to their paradise; holding onto it is like trying to keep every grain of a fistful of sand intact in your palm.
Beyond the walls of Count Axel’s villa, an encroaching and chaotic mob draws nearer every hour. To restore tranquility, the Count must pluck a time-reversing flower from his garden until there are none left. The story ends with the unthinking mob descending onto the villa, now a derelict property with a neglected garden, in which a statue of the Count and his Countess stand entangled in thorny belladonna plants.