The Met Gala is a collision of the centuries-old cultural forces of art and high fashion in a supernova spectacle of costumes and camera flashes.
But there are other forces at play and they're of a very American and very modern persuasion — big business and the cult of celebrity.
Because now brands are vying for attention and the Met Gala gives them an opportunity to throw millions of dollars at that mission.
This year, as fashion houses dress celebrities and culture makers and usher them to their Vogue-approved seats, sponsors will pay millions for ad space on live streams and Instagram.
In real time, the world will watch for the moments that will undoubtedly go viral, lingering in popular culture cyberspace forever.
And spectators will judge who wore what, whether it spoke to The Garden of Time theme and whether there was any controversy.
The event of today is vastly different to the Met Gala of old.
Once upon a time, it was a simple midnight supper held to raise money for the then-struggling Costume Institute.
Now, the Meta Gala is not just a fundraiser. It feeds entire off-shoot industries and economies.
It can make or break a brand.
So how did a dinner in December with a $50 entry fee morph into the cultural force that takes over every first Monday in May?
A midnight supper for New York's elite
On the New York City fashion scene in the 1940s there was perhaps no-one working harder than Eleanor Lambert.
With war in Europe, Lambert launched New York Fashion Week to give buyers a place to go to fill their stores when they couldn't go to Paris.
Lambert would go on to found the Council of Fashion Designers of America and invented the concept of a best dressed list.
But in 1946, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired 8,000 costumes and established the Costume Institute, and two years later, Lambert decided to hold a gala dinner to raise money for the new gallery.
That first Met Gala was held at the Waldorf Astoria, and Lambert, ever the publicist, billed it as "the party of the year" that would open the Costume Institute exhibition.
Back then, the annual dinner in December would move to different locations around the city.
But what Lambert founded, was brought to its fullest social life in the 1970s by Vogue's Diana Vreeland.
By then, the dinner had morphed into a festival of fashion and social status. Its image as a premier fashion event seemingly revamped overnight by Cher's bold arrival in a naked dress made of crystals, feathers and flares.
[Instagram: cher]At the time, there were such things as a student ticket.
"Our student tickets allowed us to arrive at the museum while dinner was underway, and we would all gather for drinks in the Great Hall, just like the swells earlier," fashion student of the 70s, now designer and author Steven Stolman wrote in an op-ed called 'The Met Ball was so much better in the old days'.
"At the appointed hour, the big doors would swing open and the dinner guests would begin to make their exits.
"There, right before our eyes, were Jackie Onassis, Nan Kempner, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, my very favourite gal, Pat Buckley (who chaired the event until 1995), and, of course, Diana Vreeland until her health began to fail."
It was in 1995, after running Vogue for seven years, that Anna Wintour took the helm of the Met Gala.
In the decades since, Wintour has transformed the event into something more culturally dominant than even the Academy Awards.
Anna Wintour's Met Gala
Wintour was the first to put a celebrity on the cover of Vogue, and with her leadership, the Met Gala has become more about art and fashion.
It has an enviable list of guests that includes the creative directors and lead designers at the biggest fashion houses in the world, but also the biggest names in film, sport, politics, business and now social media.
One of the most iconic American supermodels of the 1990s, Amber Valletta told Vogue recently that she'd been going to the Met Gala for decades.
"I started going [in the] late 90s and it was a totally different event. Much smaller. Only fashion industry people were there," she said.
"There wasn't a theme necessarily. There would be a point of interest in what the Costume Institute was trying to say. People didn't dress to theme.
"The red carpet was not what it is today. I mean that is a whole event in itself."
Under Wintour, the Met Gala embraced celebrity and delivered some iconic looks.
Princess Diana in a slip dress, Kirsten Dunst in a beanie and ball gown with her arms wrapped around Jake Gyllenhaal, Liv Tyler and Stella McCartney in matching, homemade "Rock Royalty" T-shirts.
The simplicity of these laid-back looks of the past has of course now been overtaken by moment-making wearable art.
Designer Guo Pei dressed Rihanna for the 2015 China Through the Looking Glass gala.
That red carpet moment caught fire on social media with the bright yellow train of the dress falling down the Met steps compared to an omelette. It might have been a little savage, but it went viral.
"Rihanna wearing my design had a great impact – and the international fashion industry gained a new understanding of me," Pei told the Guardian years later.
Fashion design and industry researcher at RMIT Associate Professor Ricarda Bigolin said on the Met Gala red carpet "a big moment can catapult a whole brand".
"The big moment can translate to sales — the accessible sales — the things that people can buy, the things that are in the shops. There's often a line between the Met Gala outfits and collections," she said.
So how do fashion brands collaborate with a celebrity — someone who is meticulously curating their own public brand — to have a major Met Gala moment?
For celebrities with the most star power, they will have a brief for designers and they may end up selecting the final look from a series of outfits that have been created.
"The celebrity press team and their management [might say] 'hey we want Billie Eilish to look uber femme this year', so suddenly they're not looking for suits and tracksuits," Ms Bigolin said.
"So they're dealing with managing that and that would be related to all of the marketing strategy that particular celebrity has in terms of their album, the artwork on the album, the content. It ends up being this crazy meta collaboration."
The objective? To "leverage off each other" and create a moment that lives on.
"It's a transaction. So this is about exchanging cultural capital that's now monetised by social media."
To fans, the event continues to push the boundaries of fashion, while there are some critics who say it has turned into a display of commercialisation.
The thing about Anna Wintour is that she has always existed at the intersection of fashion and business.
She not only defines what is fashionable, but determines who gets to make money off those fashionable things.
And under her direction, the Met Gala has become a money making machine — for the Costume Institute, for Vogue and for all the micro industries and economies it feeds.
The money behind the Met Gala
The late American fashion journalist and former editor-at-large of Vogue, André Leon Talley, described the Met Gala as the "Superbowl of social fashion events".
And just like America's biggest sports occasion, major brands are willing to pay huge sums to ensure their creativity is on show at the event.
"It's the pinnacle of art, fashion and culture," Andrew Au, president of Intercept Group, a marketing agency that targets millennials, told Forbes.
"It's the who's who guest list for brands. If your brand plays in this space, you can't afford not to take part."
The former chief executive for Louis Vuitton, Michael Burke, went so far as to say the show is "the pinnacle" of his business.
"Other companies have different goals, but we want to show we are relevant in extreme fashion," he told the Wall Street Journal.
Tables of 10 can set designers back at least $US350,000 ($540,000) , but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the exposure the event can generate.
"It's a very serious promotion machine," Ms Bigolin said.
"It's an accrual of cultural capital, just being part of it, but ... it's a way for brands to get really wide circulation now."
Because while the fashion houses are creating moments on the red carpet, that will eventually trickle down to influencing someone's purchasing decisions in store, the attention the Met Gala is able to capture is worth money too.
Wintour reportedly spends the day after the event chasing her staff for updates on how much traffic the magazine's website is getting.
After the pandemic cancelled 2020's Met Gala, the 2021 version underwent the same change that had been occurring in spare bedrooms and on kitchen tables across the world — it was broadcast via a live stream.
Three years later, Vogue Business reported the 2023 Met Gala live stream recorded 53 million views across 10 Vogue markets and social platforms. This doubled 2022's viewership.
Anna Wintour was famously late to the digital media revolution, but she has very much caught up.
Trend forecaster Sarah Owens told the ABC social media had forced the Met Gala to "shape shift".
"You kind of think an event like the Met Gala that is so institutional and is so top down, kind of leads its own dance, but with the advent of platforms like Instagram, we saw around 2012 how that really started to impact who was invited, how they're dressed, and then fast forward a few years it was the YouTube influencers and bloggers [were included]," she said.
For a segment of the red carpet arrivals in 2023, the Vogue live stream was hosted by YouTube darling Emma Chamberlain.
It was an acknowledgement of both the power of social media influencers and their Wintour-approved place at the ballroom tables next to fashion's elite.
"To have such a young Gen Z creator interview some of the world's most famous people without any experience in journalism is really telling [about] Vogue's interest in galvanising a new audience and demographic to stay interested and attuned to what's becoming a bit of a legacy event," Ms Owens said.
Advertising buyers estimate the value of Vogue's Met Gala live stream to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
And while the likes of Chamberlain host the official live stream, there are content creators around the world whipping up what they're seeing into memes, lists and even streaming live reads themselves.
This year's event is sponsored by TikTok.
"It's really interesting because of the many different brands and associated economies that feed off this event. It's really different to anything we've experienced before," Ms Bigolin said.
Journalist and author of Anna: The Biography Amy Odell said "Anna has used the event to build the fashion industry".
"She wants people to mix and mingle and come up with ways to work together.
"I think this is one thing that has made attending so desirable, which has enabled her to raise the ticket prices so much over the years."
Under Wintour's reign, the event has delivered $US223.5 million for the Costume Institute, with last year's gala alone raking in approximately $US13.5 million.
But money alone does not guarantee entry. All guests must be approved by Wintour and Vogue, each person hand-picked according to a unique set of qualifications of cultural appeal, achievement and star power.
To be among the cacophony of names on Anna Wintour's seating chart, a guest must be, above all else, "in".
The Met Gala has its critics
The Met Gala has always been about money and power.
But the days of New York's elite gossip, smoking, drinking martinis, and rubbing shoulders with David Bowie, Jackie Kennedy and a teenaged Brooke Shields are over.
Now it's a corporate behemoth with serious money involved — careers can be made by a well-liked Met Gala ensemble, fashion houses live and die by who chooses their wares.
But most of what can be monetised — everything Vogue wants us to have photos of — happens on the way into the event.
So once you ascend those steps and get inside one of the most exclusive parties on Earth is it actually, well, fun?
"It is such a jerk parade," comedian Tina Fey said of the event.
"It was like a crazy countdown to when [I] could escape," writer Lena Dunham said in 2016 — though she attended the following year anyway.
Singer Demi Lovato found the whole experience so distressing that she left early and attended a nearby Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
"It was very cliquey. I remember being so uncomfortable that I wanted to drink," she said in 2018.
Guests are dissuaded from bringing their phones and entourages are banned entirely, which means celebrities are forced to mingle with strangers.
"The overall ambience isn't super friendly," an unnamed gala regular told Page Six in 2018.
"It's not like walking into a party where you know everyone and everyone's happy to see you."
In the 2016 documentary The First Monday In May, Wintour is seen looking at the Met Gala seating chart like a military commander assessing her battle plans.
She points to one guest's name — blurred out by the documentary's editors — and looks disdainfully at her assistant.
"Can he not be on his cell phone the entire time? Maybe send him that message?" she sighs.
While most of the names are written on pink and blue stickers, Wintour points to a small stack of green stickers tacked to the very edge of the map.
"Who are those people?" she asks.
"Those are people I'm hoping will go away," the assistant responds.
Fashion, art and celebrity collide
While the Met Gala has grown into a corporate branding exercise, its cultural impact under Wintour's reign is also indisputable.
The event is responsible for some of the most significant pop culture moments of the 21st century.
Would we have Beyonce's 2017 magnum opus Lemonade if Solange hadn't been caught slapping her husband in an elevator after the Met Gala?
"Of course, sometimes s**t go down when it's a billion dollars on an elevator," she sang on her Flawless remix.
And the 2016 Met Gala was a seminal event for Taylor Swift, who co-chaired the event in a fried bleached bob and black lipstick.
On that historic night, she met and danced with Tom Hiddleston, leading to a brief fling that gifted us with the sight of the British actor in a "I love TS" tank top and the Swift classic Getaway Car.
She also made the acquaintance of another British actor, Joe Alwyn, during the same gala.
Their subsequent six-year relationship helped inspire some of the singer-songwriter's most memorable work, including Lover, Delicate, Champagne Problems and So Long, London.
The Gala is also the setting for Ocean's 8 during which a gang of female thieves conspire to infiltrate the event to steal a $150 million diamond necklace off the shoulders of Anne Hathaway.
"This was done from the very beginning with the collaboration, advice and the assistance of Vogue," Ocean's 8 director Gary Ross told Vulture of the famous editor's involvement in the project.
"Anna wanted to make sure the aesthetics were up to her standards."
In taking the gala out of the secretive world of Manhattan's elite, something spontaneous may have been lost.
Critics say it's a branding exercise, a testament to the excesses and exclusionary nature of celebrity culture.
But does it really matter?
For a certain online subculture, the Met is the Olympics, the Oscars, the AFL Grand Final.
The internet delights in sitting around in tracksuit pants to debate, critique and meme-ify the haute couture that ascends those glorified steps.
On the first Monday in May, we can laugh at Jared Leto's antics, wait with bated breath for Rihanna, and hope that whatever happens inside the gala inspires as much artistic expression as it claims to support.
