Met Gala 2021

For years, the Met Gala has taken place on the first Monday in May. But the pandemic changed everyone’s plans in 2020, and fashion’s “biggest night,” as it’s so often described, was canceled. The Costume Institute’s corresponding spring exhibit, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” never got its celebrity-driven theme party, although it did eventually open to the public in October — just fashionably late, and with limited capacity.

So what about this year? On Monday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Costume Institute is back in business. Its next major exhibition will have not one but two parts — something that’s never been done before — and both will be … drumroll, please … Americana themed. Yeehaw!