The Bland, the Bad, and the Ugly: Review of the 2024 Met Gala
On the first Monday of May each year, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute both funds and commemorates the opening of its major fashion exhibition of the year by hosting The Met Gala, a glamorous high-profile and haute-couture event attended by A-list global celebrities. While the event itself is highly exclusive, the arrival of the Gala’s guests draws massive coverage each year as the fashion world tunes in to gawk at the avant-garde outfits worn by the attendees as they enter the Met on the event’s red carpet.
This year, The Met Gala recognized the opening of the exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, a new sensory-immersive experience featuring hundreds of garments too fragile to be worn again, displayed off-mannequin in glass boxes. These garments, all connected by a theme of nature, lie in these boxes as “Sleeping Beauties.” The dress code for the celebrities in attendance was The Garden of Time, a reference to a short story by J.G. Ballard about the fleeting beauty of nature and the inevitability of death.
Taking in all this information regarding the theme of the exhibition and the dress code, one may expect the outfits of the 2024 event to highlight the delicacy of the natural world and the juxtaposition between the power of Mother Nature and her fragility at the hands of humanity. One may expect the clothing to be a testament to nature’s sheer beauty.
This is why it is pretty hilarious that some of the outfits at the 2024 Met Gala were the most egregious statements I have ever had the unfortunate experience of laying my eyes on. Here are 4 of my least favorite looks from the night of celebrities who did not understand the assignment:
1. Michelle Yeoh and Her Glorified Hershey Kiss Dress
The star of Everything Everywhere All At Once graced the red carpet with a Balenciaga dress that looked like the crumpled-up aluminum foil wrapper I throw in the Chipotle trash can after I finish my burrito. According to Yeoh, the creative director of Balenciaga was inspired by memories of playing with tin foil as a child—the dress was meant to “awaken” memories of childhood while looking like it was “‘frozen in time.’” This inspiration resulted in a silver strapless ball gown with a voluminous skirt that made her look like a walking Hershey Kiss. Balenciaga loves to design outfits that look like low-quality garbage, and that passion really came through with this look. Additionally, it is a stretch to connect her outfit to the dress code.
2. Lizzo’s Rainforest Café Couture
This year, Lizzo’s outfit was truly channeling the uncanny valley and “camp” of Tracey Tree from the Rainforest Café in all the worst ways. Lizzo wore a Weinsanto head-to-toe corset adorned with rose petals to suggest the shape of a flower and ornamental vases, with the boning of the corset dress folding outwards radially at the bottom. This led her to appear more like a jewelry tray or like the animatronic tree of a near-defunct restaurant chain than an ode to The Garden of Time. The strange trapezoidal bonnet headpiece further added to the camp-gone-wrong her look emulated. While the look was on theme, something Balenciaga could not achieve, the designers, in my opinion, did not make the bodycon shape flatter the beauty of Lizzo’s curves, ultimately making her look frumpy rather than high fashion.
3. Amelia Gray and Her Wet Hair
Model, TV star, and Instagram celebrity Amelia Gray makes the list of my least favorite looks for the sheer wasted potential of her outfit. Gray wore a yellow dress by Jun Takahashi included in the Met’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibit; the main feature of the dress is its light-up terrarium for a skirt with flowers and butterflies enclosed behind the glass. Gray’s look was the most avant-garde and experimental of the night; it completely encapsulated the theme of The Garden of Time by highlighting the fragile beauty of the butterflies and flowers inside the dress. If it was not for the abysmal styling making me question if Gray’s team finished dressing her with their eyes closed, her outfit would have been my favorite look of the night. The decision to have her long hair sopping wet and sloppily tucked behind her necklace was certainly a choice. It is a choice that made her look like she overslept, got ready last minute, and didn’t finish blow-drying her hair.
4. Chris Hemsworth and the Color Beige
It is a pity to be one of the co-chairs of the Met Gala and absolutely serve the crowd nothing. How do you head one of the biggest nights of haute-couture and show up in a beige suit? Hemsworth’s look was so boring that I was close to dozing off and becoming one of the “Sleeping Beauties” of this year’s exhibit. Hemsworth’s look—a beige Tom Ford 3-piece, an open white button-up, and black shoes—would have been appropriate for a sailing trip on a yacht, a trip to the country club, or another stereotypical old-money outing, not the Met Gala. There was not a floral element in sight on his outfit, not even a lazy flower brooch pinned haphazardly to his lapel. In all, Hemsworth was unfortunately lacking that Monday night.
Of course, everything I say is good fun. Some of my favorite looks include Tyla’s “sands of time” gown and Nicki Minaj’s gold dress featuring 3D flowers. I respect and admire the designers for their efforts at this year’s Met Gala, and the celebrities this year, as always, looked stunning.
(Photos credit of Getty Images)
