On Monday evening, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art christened its new Condé M. Nast Galleries with an aptly themed Met Gala: “Fashion Is Art.”
It was a perfect Goldilocks of a directive; not so broad that an outside observer couldn’t identify the connecting thread (hello, “gilded glamour”), not so specific as to invite a whole bunch of similar looks (we love you, Karl Lagerfeld, but that was a lot of tweed). Monday evening’s attendees paid homage to artworks, to artists, to artistic concepts. There were tributes to expressionism and abstraction and mythology and film, to the human form in art as well as the distorting liberties art takes with it. A good dress code results in a variety of dignified, thoughtful riffs on a central motif, and under the direction of co-chairs Anna Wintour, Venus Williams, Nicole Kidman and Beyoncé, and with funding from Amazon founder and executive chairman (and Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos and the planning participation of his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, this one did.