How the Met Gala Became the Fashion Oscars

On Monday night, some of the biggest celebrities in the country, dressed in their finest and most outrageous couture, will assemble at the steps of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the biggest red carpet event of the year. They’ll enter the museum for a high-profile celebration of fashion — sponsored by TikTok this year — that remains entirely out of sight of the public’s gaze, so that all we see will be the arrival of the beautiful and wealthy. This is the Met Gala, and for an event that is theoretically just for fashion nerds and doesn’t even get televised inside, it has a remarkable cultural cachet.