For nearly two decades, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s annual benefit gala has taken place the first Monday in May. The following morning, however — the first Tuesday in May, perhaps — is its own secondary holiday for fashion fans: an internet-wide roundtable, sometimes contentious, about the theme.

“Celebs fumbled the easiest theme ever,” declared culture critic Mina Le after 2022’s “In America” edition of the event (dress code: “gilded glamour, white tie”); other observers grumbled at how many guests took “gilded” literally and came dressed in glittering gold rather than Gilded Age-inspired garb. After the 2019 “camp”-themed event, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote that the year’s theme was especially difficult to dress to: “By virtue of attempting a pure camp look, you’ve already failed at it — particularly if you’ve succeeded.”

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Every year, the Met Gala celebrates the opening of an exhibit with a corresponding theme; last year’s Karl Lagerfeld-themed gala, for example, celebrated the opening of a Lagerfeld exhibit. This year’s exhibit is titled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” while the gala’s dress code — which, as Vogue has emphasized this year, can differ from the exhibit’s theme! — is “The Garden of Time.”

The exhibit was announced in November, and the event received a supplemental reading assignment, a few months later. In February, Vogue clarified that the gala’s theme would be “Garden of Time” — inspired by a 1962 J.G. Ballard short story about the consequences of trying to keep the fleeting gifts of nature permanently — and that the exhibit would focus on “clothing and fashion so fragile that it can’t ever be worn again — and are thus sleeping beauties in the scrupulous archives of the Costume Institute.”

The passage of time and its myriad casualties: Talk about a classic costume-party theme, right?

As anyone who has paid even passive attention to the Met Gala in recent years knows, some themes result in dazzling, memorably cohesive turnouts. (“Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” from 2018 comes to mind.)

Others invite wider arrays of interpretation, and still others go largely ignored by attendees altogether: 2016’s “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” despite an exhibit that thoughtfully showcased cooperation between human and machine in making haute couture, mostly resulted in metallics and silver ensembles, and 2021’s Met Gala (exhibit and gala theme: “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion”) was a relatively anything-goes affair. For celebrities and their stylists, though, every kind of theme — whether hyper-specific, open to interpretation or head-scratchingly ambiguous — presents its own challenges.

Historically, the Met Gala’s themes didn’t mean much at all. In 1998, for instance, the theme was “Cubism and Fashion” — but you’d never know it from the photos. “You would maybe wear a gown with special earrings,” says Brian Meller, a New York-based stylist represented by the Wall Group and a Met Gala veteran. “And now, wearing a normal gown would be, like, the biggest misstep you could do.”

One obvious catalyst for such a transformation is the instant, global feedback made possible by social media. Back then, “the theme was for fun. Now the theme has become a very serious thing, because being off-theme is very not okay,” Meller says with a laugh. Which only heightens the stakes when a theme is, like this year’s, somewhat vague and cerebral: “You have thousands of people that are all going to give their opinions on whether it was on the theme or wasn’t.”

Last year’s Met Gala theme, by contrast, was the decidedly straightforward “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” in tribute to the legendary (and controversial) designer who died in 2019. “When it’s something like Karl Lagerfeld, Vogue doesn’t really have to publish much more or give us much more information for us to start brainstorming,” says Meller, who dressed actress Lea Michele for both the 2023 and 2024 events.

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Sarah Slutsky, a New York-based stylist who has more than a decade’s experience dressing Met Gala attendees, agrees. “Last year’s was one of the most literal,” she says.

When a theme or dress code feels straightforward, Meller says, stylists expect to see some overlapping ideas and motifs between their clients’ ensembles and other attendees’. But when there’s a broader range of viable interpretations, “you have to think about: What is everyone else going to do? And how do you make it different, but also stray not too far?” Meller says. “Because even if you feel like you have a really specific reference to the theme, if you’re the only one who dressed like that, most people are just going to be like, ‘Why did you dress like that?’”

Georgia Medley, the London-based stylist who dressed “I May Destroy You” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” actress Michaela Coel to co-host last year’s Met Gala, is sitting this year’s gala out. But as an onlooker, she felt an amused kind of terror learning that the exhibit was titled “Sleeping Beauties” while the official gala theme was “Garden of Time.”

“I was just thinking: ‘Oh, no, imagine if you got it the wrong way ’round?’” Medley says with a laugh. That said, Medley points out, Wintour and her team at Vogue make themselves available as a behind-the-scenes resource for invitees and their stylists during planning season, including to field questions about the theme. It’s all, as Medley puts it, “quite strategic.”

Still, those watching from home should understand before they post online: Not every celebrity (or their stylist) gets full control over what they wear. As Slutsky, whose past Met Gala clients have included Rachel Zegler, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Cynthia Erivo, explains: “It really depends. Is your client going as a guest with a designer or a brand? Or are they going as a guest of Vogue, or otherwise attending not attached to a designer?”

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In other words, a partnership with a designer or fashion house might determine which archives or recent runway looks a celebrity has access to. Or in the case of a custom design, whose particular visual vocabulary the theme will be interpreted into. Some will lend themselves easily to a given theme. Others, inevitably, won’t.

That said, a looser theme is preferable to a high-concept one.

Meller, too, spoke plainly: A theme as amorphous-seeming as this year’s could be more fun for outside observers than even last year’s easily graspable Lagerfeld tribute. “There was a lot of black and white. Which was gorgeous, and it came out so well,” he says. But this year’s theme — which could produce a lustrous collection of what Vogue describes as “melancholic” florals — “I think this will be more fun.”

“It’s not just putting your client in a dress,” Medley says. “You’re telling a story in that moment.”

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