NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces today the co-chairs for The Costume Institute’s annual spring benefit on May 2, 2022, in New York.
Regina King, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, and Lin-Manuel Miranda will serve as the evening’s co-chairs. Tom Ford, Adam Mosseri, and Anna Wintour will continue their roles as honorary co-chairs for the event, following last September’s benefit for Part One of the In America exhibition.
In celebration of Part Two, In America: An Anthology of Fashion, The Costume Institute Benefit (also known as The Met Gala™) will return to the first Monday in May. The event provides The Costume Institute with its primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, operations, and capital improvements.
Opening to the public on May 7, In America: An Anthology of Fashion will explore the foundations of American fashion through a series of sartorial displays featuring individual designers and dressmakers who worked in the United States from the 19th to the mid-late 20th century.
The show will feature approximately 100 examples of men’s and women’s dress from this formative period that reveal unfinished stories about American fashion. The garments will be presented within the rich atmospheric setting of the Museum’s American Wing period rooms, or historical interiors, which encapsulate a curated survey of more than a century of American domestic life and reveal a variety of stories—from the personal to the political, the stylistic to the cultural, and the aesthetic to the ideological. The complicated social, cultural, and artistic narratives of these spaces amplify and contextualize the exhibition’s key themes—the inception of an identifiable American style and the emergence of the named designer, who is recognized for their distinct artistic sensibility.
Inspired by the curatorial vision of Andrew Bolton, Jessica Regan, and Amelia Peck, eight film directors —Janicza Bravo, Sofia Coppola, Julie Dash, Tom Ford, Regina King, Martin Scorsese, Autumn de Wilde, and Chloé Zhao—will create fictional cinematic vignettes, or “freeze frames,” within each room, imparting new perspectives on American fashion and highlighting the directors’ singular aesthetics. Together, these dynamic and interconnected elements will offer a nuanced portrait of American fashion and the individuals who defined it during this pivotal period.
In addition, six “case studies” will be incorporated into the American Wing galleries beyond the period rooms, offering an in-depth look at historical garments that distill key moments in the development of American fashion from the 19th to the mid-late 20th century.
Part Two of In America is a collaboration between The Costume Institute and the Museum’s American Wing. It is the final installment of The Costume Institute’s trilogy of period-room shows, which began with Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century (2004) in the French Period Rooms and was followed by AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion (2006) in the English Period Rooms.
Parts One and Two will be on view concurrently; Part One, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, is on view in the Anna Wintour Costume Center and celebrates The Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary. Starting March 21, more than half of the pieces in the Lexicon exhibition will be rotated out, and garments by designers not yet featured—as well as designers whose work appeared in the first rotation—will be displayed. These additions will reflect the vitality and diversity of contemporary American fashion. Parts One and Two will close on September 5, 2022.
