On the 2024 Met Gala’s green and cream carpet, an unexpected theme began to surface—or maybe the word is settle?—as the stars alighted: one of decay, deterioration, and physical attenuation.
These words may typically bear negative connotations, but such wasn’t the case at the Met on Monday. There was a beautiful, tonal romance to the sub-trend—and the looks (detailed below) struck a more resonant chord in my note-taking than the obvious, sometimes overwhelming flowery garb that otherwise dominated the night.
Deterioration—in some way, shape, or form—does make sense, considering the dress code of the night, “The Garden of Time,” and the nature-centered exhibition the party heralded. (The “sleeping beauties” in the show’s title refer to garments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection that have become too fragile even to mount on a mannequin; they are visible throughout the galleries in coffin-like vitrines.)
Time doesn’t just grow and enrich; it also erodes. It moves ahead but, universally, it reverses the course of immaculateness. It renders the initially pristine ultimately imperfect. And when it came to representing decay, designers let their imaginations run romantically wild.
Kylie Minogue, for example, wore a form-fitting floor-length dress from Diesel by Glenn Martens. In its knit crystals, the almost crumbled form of her body emerged in strips of soft, flocked denim.
“It’s dissolved through time,” Martens told me on the carpet. “As if Kylie was sleeping for millions of years, and the garment has disintegrated around her body. And yet, even then she shines.” Minogue echoed Martens’s sentiment: “It’s kind of an anti-gown, in that sense.”
