The Met Plans an American Fashion Extravaganza

This year’s Met Gala will be in September. The Costume Institute has announced its next big show. The subject: American style. Politics are involved.

All those people who said American fashion was dead and that the pandemic, with its bankruptcies and store closures, was simply the tolling of the final bell? The people who pointed to the anemic state of the digital New York Fashion Week, with its lack of big names and buzz, and said it was over? The people who said it was going to be sweatpants and Crocs from now on? Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Anna Wintour, trustee, Costume Institute booster and Condé Nast chief content officer, have a message for them: Get thee to a museum. On Monday they unveiled plans for not one but two big and interconnected Costume Institute shows, both focused on (you guessed it) American fashion. And there would be not one but two Met Galas alongside them.