Met Gala announces its 2024 theme: 'Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion'

By Mason Leib

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Wednesday that "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" will be the highly anticipated theme for the Costume Institute's Spring 2024 Exhibition and Gala.

According to a release from the Met, the theme will "explore notions of rebirth and renewal, using nature as a metaphor for the impermanence of fashion."

No co-chairs for the event have been announced for the benefit, known as the Met Gala, which is set for May 6, 2024, and celebrates the launch of the spring exhibition. Proceeds from the event go towards funding the Costume Institute's exhibitions and other projects.

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Editor-in-Chief of Vogue Anna Wintour attends The Metropolitan Museum of Art's announcement of the Costume Institute's spring 2024 exhibition, "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" in New York on November 8, 2023.

The exhibition, which will be open to the public from May 10 through Sep. 2, 2024, will look to bridge the gap between the natural world and fashion.

"The exhibition will feature original research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies to revive and explore the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum's collection," according to the release.

Visitors to the exhibition will find roughly 250 garments and accessories spanning over four centuries of fashion history. Multiple galleries will be organized by themes relating to the natural world, where "historical fashions will be juxtaposed with their contemporary counterparts" in a setting "intended to engage a visitor's sense of sight, smell, touch, and hearing."

Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Garments are on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's announcement of the Costume Institute's spring 2024 exhibition, "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" in New York on November 8, 2023.

"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," stated Met CEO Max Hollein in the announcement.

Last year's exhibition theme, "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty," honored the life and legacy of the world-renowned fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.

Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute, explained the exhibitions attempt to evoke the life out of the items on display.

"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," Bolton commented in the release.