What is Gilded Glamour? 2022 The Met Gala theme explained.

It is officially THAT time of the year. Fashion’s Superbowl. The Grand Finale at the main stage of Rupaul’s… No. The Met Gala! The most exciting evening where the world's hottest artists, designers, models and muses gather to celebrate the beauty, history, and creativity of fashion’s remarkably diverse eras and ages through the art of dressing up. The yearly exhibition, curated by Anna Wintour and Andrew Bolton at the Met Museum in New York tends to always explore a movement or era of societal shift and feeling (or in some cases, the dichotomies of aesthetics, think Schiaparelli vs. Prada: Impossible Conversations). And this year is no different.

After a non-existent Met Gala in 2020, the event opened back up in September 2021, announcing the exhibition will be in 2 parts: The first one, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” celebrated the history and beauty behind the American designer, the symbols and details of American culture and popular culture that served as a beacon of crafting culture, especially in the 90s. Iconic fashion masterminds like Halston, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein were celebrated next to new-gen creatives like Conner Ives and Christopher John Rogers, all of whose work extrapolated the expressive American meaning of dressing.

This year’s second part of the exhibition “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” will trace back to 19th century America, a new country growing and progressing rapidly, alongside layered and complex politics. Within a time period of vast developing inventions like the lightbulb by Thomas Edison in 1879, the first big home electric appliance in the face of the fridge in 1913 by Fred Wolf and the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, America’s fierce reach for the future was stronger than ever.

By providing a retrospective look into fashion’s role during the Gilded era, one could analyse the vast influence that European and British settlements had across America, especially within corsetry and sartorial codes. This year’s dress code being Gilded Glamour has opted for many to think about voluptuous silhouettes, ruffles, collars and glitzy beaded draping, embellished with gold motifs and sequins, with peculiar attention to a corseted, fitted and accentuating silhouette, specifically for women. If you have seen any American period drama (The Gilded Age on HBO being everyone’s most recent obsession), you would have witnessed the specific attitudes of fashion during the 1880s, fiercely driven by the most coveted event at the time, The Vanderbilt Ball. The event championed an attitude, driven by the Industrial Revolution and a social understanding of the attitudes between old money and new money, especially in the eye of inventors, whose development generated them wealth and success, skyrocketing them into the echelons of the upper class.

As the weekend countdown on the Met Gala is officially on, there is a multitude of opinions and guesses about how guests will interpret this year’s theme of American decadence. Taking a different approach, Perfect has carved out a gallery of the most interesting interpretations of Gilded Glamour by the most exciting fashion designers nowadays and their understanding of this time period, seen through the lens of the 2020s that we hope to see on Monday.