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Only Women’s Wear Daily covered the event until 1958. To drum up excitement around the first-ever Party of the Year, in October 1948, WWD published an article titled “Benefit Party for Costume Institute Set: Affair Nov. 18 to Mark First Gala Get-Together of Fashion Industry—25 Branches Represented.” The cost to attend the shindig? $50 (some $660 now). “For a long time it has been said that the fashion industry should have one big get-together each year…the committee hopes that this party will become an annual event as important as the Beaux Arts ball used to be,” Lambert told the publication.
Little did she know just how important the event would become. By 1958, the Costume Institute had expanded its footprint at the Met—making the annual gala even more essential.
The Met Gala, the Vreeland Years
1972–1987
In 1972, Diana Vreeland, the imaginative editor in chief of Vogue from 1963 to 1971, applied her unending creativity to the Costume Institute as a consultant for the Met. The famously extravagant Vreeland had been let go from her position at Vogue, and so she channeled her eccentricities into crafting and curating exhibitions from 1972 to 1989. (Before, that responsibility went to fashion scholars and the Met’s own curators.) They tended to be more fantastical than academic—and by that same token, she would transform the Party of the Year into an event more fitting of its name.
Her 1973 exhibition, “The World of Balenciaga,” garnered much attention. Opening a year after the master couturier’s death, the show was an ode to his decades-long career; Vreeland even spritzed Balenciaga perfume throughout the galleries. That same year, the party really took off: Not only did it now take place at the museum itself (specifically, the Medieval Sculpture Hall), but Oscar de la Renta designed the tablecloths for the dinner of pâté, potage, blanquette de veau, salad, and Brie, as reported by The New York Times.
In later years, Vreeland also called upon her anyone-who’s-anyone Rolodex to amplify the event. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis served as co-chair of the gala in both 1976 and 1977, and legendary interior designer Billy Baldwin was tasked with handling the decor.
The final Costume Institute exhibition curated by Vreeland was 1986’s “Dance.” In 1987, the exhibition “In Style: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Costume Institute” celebrated 50 years of the Institute, and the gala in December honored Ms. Vreeland and her many contributions to the department—though Vreeland herself was notably absent. (She would pass away in 1989.)
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