3 Best Met Gala themes of all time

What keeps the Met Gala exciting is its themes, which the attending celebrities and the designers have to abide by while creating their looks for the red carpet. It's the themes that set the stage for the year's event and make it memorable for years to come.

The Met Gala has seen several iconic themes over the years with the late 90s seeing themes dedicated to the designers, which morphed into themes that gave an ode to a culture. Like China: Through the Looking Glass or American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.

The Met has also had themes that demanded the attendees use their imagination. Such themes were Manus X Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, Rock Style, The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, Camp: Notes on Fashion, etc.

The theme this year is The Garden of Time, which will see the attendees dress to the themes of flora and fauna, birth and death, and growth and decay.

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Three best Met Gala themes of all time

1) China: Through the Looking Glass

The 2015 Met Gala theme was the same as its exhibition theme. The objective of this was to explore how China had impacted fashion imagination for centuries. It encouraged the attendees to look back on Chinese aesthetics and embody them in their design vision. While some celebrities who walked the carpet went the traditional Chinese way, others made a Westernized fusion out of it.

The theme became a catalyst for many iconic looks that wouldn't have come to life had the Met not decided upon this oriental saga. Rihanna's gold-toned cape from the Chinese couturier Guo Pei will forever be embedded in the memories of fashion enthusiasts, thanks to China: Through the Looking Glass.

Apart from RiRi, other looks to make a mark that night were those of Sarah Jessica Parker, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Anne Hathway, and Justin Bieber. Their vision not only matched the theme with precision but also made it a theme to remember.

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2) Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology

A year after the incredible theme of China: Through the Looking Glass, the Met Gala stunned once again with Manus x Machina in 2016. This year too, the red carpet theme coincided with the theme at the exhibit, and saw the attendees wearing numbers were made using technology over the ones that usually are handmade.

The objective of the theme was to see more couture or avant-garde outfits that could be made to wear, merging the creativity of a human with the accuracy of a machine. The other way the theme was interpreted was the futuristic merger of humans with machines.

Among the artists to remember this year were Gigi and Zayn who came looking futuristic, with Zayn even dawning a metallic arm. The other couple to steal the show that evening was Kim and Kanye with silver finish matching outfits. Taylor Swift came in with a 3-D printed Louis Vuitton dress, while Zoe Kravitz showed up in a Valentino dress with a mask.

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3) Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

The objective of this 2018 Met Gala theme was to bring modern-day fashion face-to-face with medieval art, which was largely based on the Catholic religion. The attendees had to come in dressed in outfits that were an artsy version of traditional devotional dressing and leaned towards Catholicism.

For the exhibition, Anna Wintour had papal robes from the Sistine Chapel brought to the Met Museum, some of which have never gone outside the Vatican. Rihanna once again stunned with her number this evening as she stepped in wearing a papal minidress with a coat and a hat. Another unforgettable look that day was that of Blake Lively's.

Other celebrities who looked significant that night were Zendaya, Chadwick Boseman, Kim Kardashian, Jared Leto, Priyanka Chopra, and Lana Del Ray.

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The theme for Met Gala 2025 will be Extragalactic: A Retrospective on Space and Fashion.