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Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibit at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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This year’s Met Gala was sponsored in part by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2023/11/11/jonathan-anderson-loewe/" target=_blank>Loewe</a>, the Spanish brand designed by Jonathan Anderson. Loewe’s designs are featured in the exhibition, and at the entrance to the gallery is a pop-up filled with branded candles, hats and T-shirts. Loewe dressed 17 high-profile guests — including  Ayo Edebiri, Greta Lee, Josh O’Connor and Ariana Grande — and is hosting an after-party.

But it was not Anderson’s Met Gala. The night belonged to John Galliano.

Galliano, the designer of Maison Margiela who was fired from his job as creative director of Dior following antisemitic rants, has been quietly creeping back into public consciousness. A longtime friend of Wintour, he designed a ravenously received couture collection in January that’s already considered one of the standout fashion experiences of this decade, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/03/17/galliano-documentary/" target=_blank>a documentary, “High &amp; Low: John Galliano,” seemed to grease the wheels for a more public return for the designer</a>, even a new job. Or at least the opportunity for him to be less private, less apologetic or less guilty.

On Monday, he dressed six guests, far fewer than Loewe, but they were names with big impact: Zendaya, who hadn’t been at the Met Gala in five years; Kim Kardashian, with a corset that shrunk her waist to a frightful circumference; Bad Bunny, probably the most influential male musician in the world of style; Gwendoline Christie, who held court on Vogue’s live stream for nearly three hours; Natasha Poonawalla, a London School of Economics grad with many close friends in the fashion industry; and actor Adrien Brody.

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Galliano was not there, but he hovered over the evening. (Notably, Anna Wintour wore Loewe.) <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/03/17/galliano-documentary/" target=_blank>There had been rumors that the “Sleeping Beauties” exhibition </a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/03/17/galliano-documentary/" target=_blank>was supposed to be a retrospective for Galliano</a>; there have also been suggestions that he will move from Margiela, a low-key house owned by Renzo Rosso’s OTB, which also owns Diesel, Marni and a handful of other sassy art-house brands, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/03/17/galliano-documentary/" target=_blank>back to LVMH, where he began his career at Givenchy before heading to Dior</a>.

But even without the exhibition dedicated to his work, Galliano seized the stage. As if all those celebrities weren’t enough, after the red carpet had effectively wrapped up, Zendaya came out and walked again in a Galliano design, made when he was at Givenchy, in the mid-’90s. Law Roach, Zendaya’s stylist, helped make vintage designs on the red carpet cool, so in a way, this was not unexpected. But whether he and Zendaya intended to participate in the campaign to bring Galliano back into the spotlight, the takeaway was that he is a designer worth celebrating — so much so that one of his dresses is not enough.

The real newsmaker dress of the night, though, was certainly Kardashian’s. On the carpet, she looked as though she was in pain, struggling to move or perhaps even breathe as she grasped at her cozy gray cardigan.

The look was a custom one but similar to those seen in designer Galliano’s couture show in January. That show, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/02/03/marc-jacobs-galliano/" target=_blank>inspired by Brassaï’s photographs of Parisian creatures of the night</a>, was so successful because it brought together so many of Galliano’s personal demons — his status as an industry outcast, the way he now “lurks” around the industry — and our own contemporary obsessions with body modifications, such as Botox and plastic surgery, and grafted them onto historical garments freighted with ghostly seriousness. We think we have escaped controlling absurdities like the corset, but our need to “fix” and “tweak” and even rebuild ourselves with lasers, needles and knives is just as disturbing.

Kardashian’s look and figure have morphed tremendously before the world’s gaze, and she has single-handedly rewritten the global beauty standard into something less like a suggestion and more like a preset menu with no substitutions. Not since Marilyn Monroe, whom she has channeled before, have the media and young women had such specific ideas about what is attractive — long black hair, plush lips, tiny waist and a large butt — but they’re all the more shocking because we believe anyone can pay for them. We have so much more control over our appearance than we’ve ever had before, yet so limiting an idea of what to do with that control. 

Otherwise, many guests looked classic but not boring. Loewe and Balenciaga had the best looks of the evening, because their creative directors, Anderson and Demna, respectively, know how to make dresses that look new without looking stupid. Edebiri and Lee both looked especially great in Loewe: Edebiri in a floral dress that erupted into a riot of color and that was a technical sight to behold, and Lee in a dress that floated around her like a ghost in search of a worthy wearer. (Good news for the ghost that it found Lee!) Nicole Kidman was Balenciaga’s standout, in a vintage-inspired dress by Cristóbal Balenciaga. Balenciaga’s dresses looked almost sci-fi in their time, and Demna knows how to update old clothes to make them look utterly strange but completely timeless.

Angela Weiss

Also notable were Amanda Seyfried in her crinkly silver Prada and headpiece, looking like a woman who pops out of a cake in a 1950s musical to sing you a creepy lullaby. Jeremy Strong wore a stark-white suit with flowers crawling up the lapel and one pompously at the throat. Rosalía wore a black column dress with a rounded train, with a veiled fascinator hovering over her face that kept her from looking too vintage-y. Michelle Williams, who often dresses with subdued crispness, dyed her hair pink and wore an appealing mountain of Chanel tulle. (Perhaps this is the tulle rule of thumb: Wear a mountain of it, not a cake.)

Several guests struck a perfect note between nutty and elegant (which is just the spot where chic exists), such as Elle Fanning, in a Balmain dress that looked like translucent gooey glass or plastic, with birds on her shoulders helping her get dressed, which made the near-nudity look cheeky; and Cole Escola in a little Thom Browne skirt suit and a pillbox hat with a veil. Escola looked ridiculous and he knew it — he had the most mischievous little smile — but it worked because everything fit so precisely.

Andrew Kelly

This year, whether it was the machinations of Wintour or the less fantastical theme, “The Garden of Time,” inspired by a J.G. Ballard short story that few of the attendees seemed aware of, things reeled back to tastefulness after years of tackiness. Fashion should be fun, of course, but the gamesmanship of the Met Gala got out of hand, such that to “win” meant you wore something outrageous, ridiculous, even hilarious. But you weren’t sure whether you could laugh at it because everyone seemed … a little on edge. We do indeed live in tacky times. But the Met Gala is supposed to be an annual memo on the definitions of glamour and fantasy — not a reflection of the world in which the rest of us live.

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All that tactfulness threw into relief how dated the idea of the “big spectacle dress” has become. Lana Del Rey in an Alexander McQueen dress with branches on her head and a veil on top looked like she was attending a gala several years ago, when those costume dresses (Blake Lively as the Statue of Liberty, or Katy Perry as a chandelier) were all the rage.

Even Cardi B in her enormous black dress was a shrug. We’ve seen that before, when Rihanna wore her enormous saffron Guo Pei cape in 2015. Amelia Grey wore a dress from a fantastic collection by Undercover, but what was electrifying on the runway just looked chintzy here, like a woman carrying around her science experiment. These dresses are like events unto themselves. Maybe it’s because it feels there is little to celebrate now, but they look off, the way a dress with huge shoulders reads as too ’80s.

ASME nominee for reviews and criticism, 2023

University of Pennsylvania, BA in English and art history

Rachel Tashjian is a fashion writer at The Washington Post.

Rachel Tashjian

The real winner of the Met Gala was John Galliano

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