The Amsterdammer

It came and went, the First Monday in May. For those of you who are unaware, this very day annually honours the most important day for fashion, for it marks the annual Met Gala, also known as the Oscars of fashion.

Let me just establish how much I love the Met Gala: I am obsessed with it. It is the one event of the year that I always look forward to. For the past four years, I’ve never failed to tune into this magical event. I distinctly remember my senior year of high school, where I found myself continuously refreshing various fashion news sites instead of preparing for my exams. This was in 2015, when the theme of the Met Gala was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” and I just couldn’t help but wonder what fashion creations celebrities and designers would come up with. However, fast forward to this year, you can imagine how gutted I felt when the Met was postponed, due to the current pandemic. 

Tragically, this year we won’t be able to see Met Gala outfits become iconic right in front of our eyes, such as Rihanna’s now famous “omlette dress” designed by Guo Pei in 2015. The annual theme for this year’s Gala would have been About Time: Fashion and Duration. As explained by Vogue, this theme is a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Costume Institution of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It intends to take you back to the “chronology of fashion”, in which reimagined “forms have been revisited”. 

Or simpler: Trends come and go and come again. That is how the fashion cycle works. Take for example combat boots, the signature shoe of the 1990s grunge style. Currently, they are making a comeback, but the way in which we’re styling them is very different. In the present day, one can see them styled with a flowy silk dress. For this we can thank Calvin Klein, who dressed Kate Moss in this silky dress for the 1995 Met Gala and now every IT girl has a variation of the dress in her closet. If you want to know more about trends of the 10s and the upcoming trends of the 2020s, feel free to read this article written by Cyrine and I. 

While we all are saddened by the delay of the Gala, Vogue once again has come to the rescue. Billy Porter and Vogue have teamed up to create the #metgalachallenge, in which they challenge everyone to recreate their favorite Met Gala looks using props and materials they already have at home. From toilet paper, to trash bags and bed sheets, people got creative. So don’t mind, keeping myself entertained by scrolling through the posts and dreaming about the next Met Gala to come our way.