Met Gala 2023 live updates: red carpet fashion, celebrity arrivals and the Karl Lagerfeld theme | Met Gala 2023

As we await the arrival of the first guests, here’s some pre-reading to whet your appetite.

If you actually want to watch the red carpet live, you can do so over at Vogue.com where the livestream will commence at 6.30pm EST (11.30pm for those staying up late in the UK; and 8.30am for all the Australians joining us for breakfast – I’m eating sequins and oat milk!)

For some speculation of what may unfold, fashion-wise, Jess Cartner-Morley has you covered. “I would love to see lots of beautiful vintage pieces,” Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton told her. Same.

For some very granular details on how the event unfolds, fashion writer and Wintour biographer Amy Odell has the hottest tea on her Substack Back Row. Some of it is paywalled off, but you can still read the bit about a long, secret queue to get in that we never see any photographs of. As per Roisin Murphy: “ It’s not an ordinary queue, it’s a queue with Beyoncé and Rihanna.”

Want to know who’s tipped to go? The Cut has a great wrap of all the rumoured guests. Rihanna, who’s already been spotted in vintage Karl Lagerfeld-era Chanel once this week, is very much on their speculative list.

And, if you’d like to do some deeper reading, I highly recommend Odell’s biography of Us Vogue’s editor in chief: Anna. It outlays the meticulous control Wintour exercises over the Gala in great detail, and chronicles how the event has become the 21st century fashion industry’s king (and queen) making night. Or, for drama, feuds, “glorious excess” and the story of Lagerfeld’s rise, turn to seminal fashion text the Beautiful Fall by Alicia Drake, which centres around the famous rivalry between Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent in 1970s Paris.

Morwenna Ferrier

Welcome to The Met Gala, the biggest night in red carpet fashion. Sure we have the Oscars, the Grammys and the Emmys, but it’s only the Met where the focus is on the gowns, and where the carpet is the event rather than simply the lead up. It’s a costume party, a social media phenomenon, a convergence of art and clothes that somehow generates more media fuss than the Super Bowl.

So what do you need to know before we kick off? The gala always takes place on the first Monday in May – today – and marks the opening of the Costume Institute’s annual blockbuster exhibition, to which it is closely themed. This year it’s “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” an homage to the longtime designer behind Chanel, Chloé, Fendi, his own Karl Lagerfeld label and early work at Balmain and Patou. Lagerfeld died in 2019, leaving a legacy that epitomised the way fashion can permeate wider culture, turning monochrome into a thing, and offending various people along the way.

This is, after all, the most controversial theme to date. It was Lagerfeld who among his many ‘Karlisms’, called Adele fat in 2012 (he later apologised), decried sweatpants as a sign of having given up and in a 2018 interview with Numéro magazine, claimed he was “fed up” with the #MeToo movement. Still, as a designer who rewrote the narrative of luxury fashion, a man as famous as the people he dressed, and a longtime friend of Wintour, becoming a Met theme was simply a matter of time. We can expect people to boycott and protests to ripple across social media regardless.

All of which makes it easy to forget The Met Gala is actually a fundraiser. Of the 400-odd celebrities and designers you’re about to see, every seat is paid for. Tickets start at $50,000 for one, and go up to $300,000 for a table, the highest on record proving even the 1% can’t avoid inflation. The money raised, of which there will be a lot, goes to the costume Institute which has to fund itself. It turns out Anna Wintour, US Vogue editor and chief architect of the event since 1999, is just pretty good at spinning a philanthropic event into the see-and-be-seen event of the year. Last year’s gala brought in $17.4 million. That’s a lot of clothes-preserved-as-art.

Of course the fun bit is seeing who turns up and what they wear. Wintour is notoriously picky with her guest-list. She’s thought to value status and buzz as much as income, which explains why there were rumours of a Kardashian ban. Already guaranteed are the Met Gala hosts – Michaela Coel, Penélope Cruz, Roger Federer and Dua Lipa. These hosts rotate each year. Other rumoured guests are Sydney Sweeney, Aubrey Plaza, Ice Spice, Rihanna and – after all that – Kim, Kylie and Kendall.

As for the fashions, designers usually dress celebrities and arrive alongside them, meaning it sits somewhere between a costume party and an advert. We can speculate as to whether Timothée Chalamet will cosplay as Karl in sunglasses and a starch-collared Hilditch & Key shirt, whether Margot Robbie will revisit some of her questionable-yet-contractual classic Chanel ambassador looks, or whether anyone will come as Choupette, Lagerfeld’s beloved Birman cat. You’ll know momentarily! What we do know is that it’s likely Lagerfeld would not have endorsed the theme. Speaking at the announcement last September, US Vogue editor Anna Wintour told the Guardian he would “be rather alarmed at the idea of his clothes appearing in a museum” and that “he loathed the idea of fashion standing still enough to be admired at a backward glance.” Which somehow makes it all the more fun. Enjoy!