The Met Gala is a benefic dinner that happens every first Monday of May in order to fundraise the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Originally organized by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948, it is now directed by Vogue’s head chief Anna Wintour.
Every year the pre-dinner carpet is surrounded by a theme according to the museum’s exhibition. This year the Met’s exhibition theme is “costume art” and it is divided into three categories: a comparison between fashion and other forms of art, like paintings; the representation (or underrepresentation) of different body-types; and fashion history itself. The Met Gala’s theme this year was quite similar but leaving room for interpretation: “fashion is art”. Through this topic, they invited guests to see themselves as a white canvases to be painted with fashion.
The Met Gala is also the perfect excuse for designers, stylists and other artists like makeup-artists or hairdressers to execute their most crazy and complex ideas while following a specific prompt, leaving us viewers thirsting for innovation not only surrounding the aesthetics but also the execution of each gown, making the use of technology key.
Since we know many people have felt like this year’s gala was a flop, that’s why we leave you some looks that used technology to their advantage, expressing their concepts in ways that are more visually layered and, therefore, interesting.
Starting with a brand that never disappoints: Iris Van Herpen.
This year the couture house limited its appearances to one, this being Olympic Eileen Gu’s bubble dress. Some may argue that this dress was not “on theme”, but let us discern because, even though the look does not reference any already existing art piece, the idea behind it does make an artistic commentary on the body as a concept.
Anna Cafolla explains in her article for Vogue that “There’s a scientific theory that some of earth’s earliest life-forms emerged from within tiny bubbles known as vesicles”, represented in this dress, not only by the “15,000 hand-formed iridescent glass bubbles [that] are individually bonded in place with UV light, releasing constellations of floating bubbles that drift into the air” placed over its weightless silhouette; but also from the actual bubbles that come from a “complex system of microprocessors, bubble nozzles, air pumps, and a portable power system that releases pressurized gas and bubbles timed by an algorithmically engineered code” as Iris Van Herpen stated via Instagram.
“The body is central in the exhibition, and what fascinates me about our body the most is not the outside but that the atomic anatomy of our bodies is all empty space—99.9% of it is empty space,” Van Herpen told Vogue in this very same article.
Following with one of the most impacting gowns, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, entrepreneur, wore a custom Jean Paul Gautier tributing the infamous Winged Victory of Samothrace, giving a twist to the sculpture concept by mimicking the origami technique. How was this possible? You might be thinking. The truth is that behind that complex structure there were not only incredibly light materials such as cotton poplin for fabric or steel bones and piano strings that sustained the shape; there were also 900 hand-made hours in the atelier by multiple artists who sculpted and folded each part of the dress. It is all of this work and a tough planning that brought this quasi-architectural design to life.
Moving onto another kind of technology, we found Tetyana’s Tom Ford creation absolutely stunning, using her body as part of the design. This dress that reminds us of the importance of ephemeral art, common in contemporary pieces, uses fringes as a way of both showing and hiding the singer’s shape, taking advantage of the body’s inability to naturally stay still. The reflective material helped the already flowing fringes to exaggerate the distortion illusion from each different point of view accentuating the magic of the performance and the uniqueness of the experience. The magic of technology doesn’t end up here. This gown unintentionally brings out the relevance of cameras, being the only way to capture and document different stages of the dress in motion, something impossible to to witness throughout a mannequin or exposition.
Speaking of cameras, we are closing this article with the pop-star of the moment Sabrina Carpenter, who literally made her dress out of film stripes, elevating the name of the so-called Seventh Art: cinema, often underestimated by its digital condition. Her custom Dior was made from actual stills of the movie Sabrina (1954) a romcom directed by Billy Wilder and starred by the infamous Audrey Hepburn. This movie was filmed in a 35mm film, the historical and professional standard that you have definitely seen in movies like Avatar or The Terminator. The name 35mm refers to the stripes width introduced in the camera which, for this film, had a spherical lens, meaning there is a certain distortion of the image, also known as “angular” often used to shoot closed spaces to make them appear wider, an effect ideal for real state agencies or for the viral 0.5 selfies that you have definitely taken.
They also played tribute to clothing structural technology from the 1870s-1890s by mimicking a bustle, a device made from metal, cane, whalebone hoops or woven horsehair flounces used to accentuate women’s posteriors and hold the skirts out in the back.
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