Met Gala 2025: Haute Couture's Biggest Night
This past Monday, May 5, a curated set of celebrities and fashionistas from around the world gathered in Manhattan for the 2025 Met Gala.
And, to be honest, I have mixed feelings – and not just about who had the best ‘fit.
The annual fundraising event, hosted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with tickets priced at $75,000 a pop, raises money for the Museum’s Costume Institute, the curatorial department of the museum focused on fashion and costume design. Beyond serving as a charity dinner, the Gala provides a huge platform for celebrities, designers, and fashion labels to exhibit cutting-edge pieces to a massive audience – Vogue’s comprehensive media coverage of the 2024 Met Gala generated 2.1 billion total video views in the first seven days.
Each year’s Gala boasts a distinct theme – decided on by the Costume Institute’s Chief Curator and the co-chairs of the event – that dictates the evening’s dress. These themes often celebrate fashion history, culture, or a specific designer, providing a creative prompt for attendees to showcase their own unique style. This year’s theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” did just that, highlighting the history of Black dandyism, a style movement rooted in the history of Black men reclaiming luxury and elegance as a form of self-expression and resistance. This is, I think, where the Met Gala works at its best: Providing dynamic themes that push designers to create innovative and culturally-important statements.
But alongside raising money for a worthwhile cause and shining a light on important fashion movements, the Met Gala also stands as a testament to problematic fashion industry practices. Haute Couture luxury brands – Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Thom Browne, Ralph Lauren, Moschino, Gucci, Dior, Prada, Balmain, Alexander McQueen, and many more – aren’t designing Gala costumes for their celebrity models with sustainability or wearability in mind.
Custom-fitting, luxury looks are the hallmarks of Haute Couture in general. After all, the phrase directly translates to “High Dressmaking.” While there are certain sustainability benefits to this model of fashion – luxury brands tend to create longer-lasting products and incorporate principles of the made-to-order movement – there are also numerous drawbacks. Heavy embellishments and intricate details take time and resources across a widening supply chain to produce. Use of high-impact fabrics is also commonplace, and the sheer amount of textiles per Haute Couture garment is dramatically greater than traditional fashion – looking at you, 20-foot train dresses.
This year’s Gala dress code, separate but connected to the theme, was “Tailored for You,” further emphasizing these distressing Haute Couture trends. The amount of resources and energy spent to produce mostly single-use fashion pieces is questionable, especially when you consider their limited utility.
What’s more, the Met Gala derives much of its cultural cache from its relationship to its featured designer brands. As such, designer brands often come away as the night’s biggest “winners” – Esquire’s article “How Pharell and Louis Vuittton
Won the Met Gala” highlights the extent to which public perception of these designer brands can be driven by their Gala collections.
When it comes down to it, I can’t help but feel that, when we celebrate the hottest ‘fits at each year’s Gala, we’re also celebrating the brands that created them. These brands, to put it mildly, have checkered pasts and presents when it comes to sustainability. While Louis Vuitton, for instance, has made strides to implement quantitative sustainability goals, there’s still much improvement needed – and it also continues to embrace the constantly changing, collection-based approach that precipitates textile waste across the industry.
My point in saying all this is not that we shouldn’t enjoy the Met Gala – it’s to say that we should be cognizant of the environmental implications while doing so. It’s not necessarily wrong to appreciate achievements in fashion, as long as we don’t slip into complacency with the brands involved. Haute Couture brands have the knowledge and experience to put sustainability at the forefront of their collections, and it’s up to us to put pressure on them to do so. Imagine what a difference it could make if the top names in fashion pushed the entire industry – and the public in general – toward sustainable practices by showcasing them in their Met Gala pieces.
Let’s make sustainable fashion the “winner” of future Met Galas, folks. If we do that, we all can win in the long run.
Alec Matulka
Doo Dah Apparel
