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Met Gala 2024: Why Is The Carpet For Fashion's Biggest Night Green This Year? Explained
Attendees of this year's Met Gala, themed Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, found themselves treading upon an off-white carpet adorned with delicate touches of airbrushed green foliage.
The Met Gala's 2024 dress code, The Garden of Time, is inspired by a J.G. Ballard story and features a cream-colored carpet with mossy green accents. The star-studded crowd, including co-chairs Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth, walked up the steps covered in the design, showcasing the evening's theme.
Departing from tradition, this carpet serves not merely as a pathway but as a portal into an immersive experience inspired by the romantic allure of pre-Raphaelite art.
Why is the Met Gala's carpet green and not red this year?
Eaddy Kiernan, the organizer of the gala, explained to Vogue that he envisioned turning the museum into an enchanting twilight forest, inspired by pre-Raphaelites, to create an enchanting atmosphere for guests. This innovative approach marks a departure from the conventional red carpet, a tradition that has evolved over the years to mirror the thematic essence of each Met Gala exhibition.
The Costume Institute's curator, Andrew Bolton, described the intricate patterns in the previous edition of The Costume Institute's exhibition as symbolizing Karl Lagerfeld's historicist, romantic, and decorative inclinations, as well as his modernist, classicist, and minimalist sensibilities, reminiscent of the exhibition's design.
Notably, the era of the red carpet concluded with the 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, paving the way for a creative evolution characterized by diverse colors, sweeping designs, and symbolic motifs that harmonize with the gala's ambiance while allowing the spotlight to shine brightly on the myriad of stunning looks gracing its surface.
The Met Gala carpet's history spans decades of fashion, art, and creative expression. Initially, a red carpet symbolizing elegance evolved into a platform celebrating the intersection of fashion and art, reflecting the event's evolution.
The Met Gala carpet has become a key part of the event's thematic experience, transforming annually to reflect the exhibition's theme. This innovative approach began in 2015 with the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition, showcasing Chinese aesthetics' influence on Western fashion. Since then, the carpet has been a canvas for artistic expression.
The Met Gala carpet has evolved over time, incorporating a variety of colors, textures, and motifs, from off-white designs with airbrushed foliage to elaborate designs inspired by pre-Raphaelite art, showcasing the event's commitment to creativity and innovation in fashion and art.
A brief about this year's Met Gala theme
This year's theme for the Met Gala stems from the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's latest exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.
"When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably. What was once a vital part of a person's lived experience is now a motionless 'artwork' that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled. The exhibition endeavors to reanimate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a diverse range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial 'access' to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions," curator Andrew Bolton said.
He continued, "By appealing to the widest possible range of human senses, the show aims to reconnect with the works on display as they were originally intended—with vibrancy, with dynamism, and ultimately with life."
The 2024 theme, The Garden of Time, features a dress code with approximately 250 garments from the Costume Institute's collection of 33,000 pieces. Many of these garments are never shown due to fragility and instead lie in glass cases, like Sleeping Beauty, to prevent them from falling apart.
"The Met's innovative spring 2024 Costume Institute exhibition will push the boundaries of our imagination and invite us to experience the multisensory facets of a garment, many of which get lost when entering a museum collection as an object. Sleeping Beauties will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion by evoking how they feel, move, sound, smell and interact when being worn, ultimately offering a deeper appreciation of the integrity, beauty and artistic brilliance of the works on display," Met Museum Director Max Hollein said.
In an interview before the big event, Hollein said the garments are "being reawakened using both traditional as well as cutting edge technologies."
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