Met Gala 2024: How the stars interpreted its ‘The Garden of Time’ dress code

With the theme, ‘Sleeping Beauties’, this year’s fashion gala calls for its attendees to come up with looks centering on the idea of 'fleeting beauty.'

May 6, 2024 11:33 PM

Every first Monday in May, the world’s gaze turns to New York as the Met Gala as the city becomes the hotspot of showstopping fashions. This year, the annual fundraiser for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute plays with the theme “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” for its spring 2024 exhibition.

The exhibition will feature approximately 250 items, chronicling over 400 years of fashion. These pieces can no longer be worn on the human body. The exhibit will include pieces designed by Schiaparelli, Dior, Givenchy, and Charles Frederick Worth ballgown from 1877, among others.

To celebrate it, the gala brings together the biggest names in the most famed industries and asks them to come up with looks based on its dress code “The Garden of Time.” A short story written by J.G. Ballard in 1962, “The Garden of Time” is a tale that centers on a count and countess living in a villa with a garden of crystalline blooms, “which when snapped from the stem, drain the garden of time and motion,” according to BBC. But the villa is facing trouble with an incoming chaotic mob. To keep its peace, the count plucks the flowers for their time-reversing effect, leading to a tragic end. The dress code is all about the idea of “fleeting beauty.”

Here’s how Met Gala 2024’s attendees interpreted this year’s dress code: