Entertainment
The best red carpet fashions from Met Gala 2024, 'The Garden of Time'
In certain circles, the words “the first Monday in May” and “the Met Gala” have become synonymous with a parade of the most glorious, outrageous couture fashion worn by a hand-selected slice of innovators and image makers.
The event is also the annual fundraiser for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute and signals the launch of an annual exhibition.This year’s,“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” features about 250 items from the Costume Institute’s permanent collection.
The dress code for the 2024 gala is “The Garden of Time,” which is taken from a dystopian 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard that uses a garden as a metaphor for cycles of human creation and destruction. So expect some goth garden wear and lots of florals on black backgrounds.
Last year’s gala, in honor of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, hauled in a reported $22 million and reams of coverage of attendees such as Doja Cat and Jared Leto, both of whom dressed as Lagerfeld’s Persian cat Choupette.
Many attribute the gala’s success to its organizer of more than two decades, the powerful Anna Wintour, who as global editorial director of Condé Nast and editor in chief of Vogue has long been a force in creating international celebrities. Wintour controls who is invited to the invitation-only event.
The gala earns outsize interest partly because its guest list isn’t revealed until the night before and the activities inside the museum gala are also kept secret (thanks to a no cellphones policy).
Yet the event also draws attention to the exhibition, which this year highlights the importance of museum fashion collections and their conservation. “Sleeping Beauties” refers to the delicate garments that will be taken from their temperature-controlled, acid-free tissue nests to come to life in new ways in the museum galleries — but not on mannequins. Using a range of technologies such as X-rays, artificial intelligence, video animation and soundscapes, the curators are reanimating garments that will never be worn again.
Or shouldn’t be. One might consider the exhibit a subtle rebuke to Kim Kardashian, who in 2022 wore —and likely ruined —the fragile gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing to President John F. Kennedy in 1962. If stylists, celebrities and socialites heed the message to let sleeping beauties lie, then important, historic clothing has a better chance of preservation for future generations.
Co-chair Chris Hemsworth and his wife, Elsa Pataky, coordinate in ivory and gold looks by Tom Ford. If Pataky and her golden princess look is an early indicator, the Met’s “Sleeping Beauties” exhibit title will inspire other fairy tale-themed ensembles.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Co-chair Bad Bunny wears a suit with the tailor’s basting stitches still visible, a hallmark of Maison Margiela, now designed by John Galliano. The Puerto Rican singer carries a bouquet, a nod to the gala’s floral dress code.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Going for the goth floral look, Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue and a Condé Nast executive, shows how to modernize antique clothing by having Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson create a cloak with a similar tulip pattern to one in the Met’s collection. Loewe is among the sponsors for the gala and exhibit.
(Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Emma Chamberlain, in a custom Jean Paul Gaultier gown in lacy, rich brown, looks as if vines have entwined her limbs, a sly nod to the garden theme.
(Kevin Mazur/MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Her height and love of theatricality make Gwendoline Christie the perfect fit for a sort of evil godmother look by Maison Margiela. Her stiff, winged hairstyle is a great fantasy accompaniment to her sheer black cape over a blood red strapless gown.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Steven Yeun’s character in “Beef” wouldn’t recognize himself on the Met’s carpet. He’s wearing a custom Thom Browne three-piece suit cut from a jacquard fabric with a pattern of ravens and roses.
(Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images)
Lea Michele, who appeared on Broadway in “Funny Girl,” wouldn’t be out of place in the Ziegfeld Follies wearing a voluminous aqua gown and cape by the Pasadena natives behind Rodarte.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Jennifer Lopez dons a silvery Shiaparelli sheer gown embellished with 2.5 million bugle beads that is vintage JLo: She practically invented the trend for wearing nude-look gowns on red carpets. But it’s the butterfly wing edging at the neckline that brings the drama.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Mindy Kaling’s tawny Gaurav Gupta gown with a gazillion gathers and a ginormous back bow makes her look like the fairy godmother we always knew she could be.
(John Shearer / WireImage)
Designer Thom Browne is having a great showing at this year’s Met Gala, even dressing Ben Simmons of the Brooklyn Nets in a customized version of a look from the designer’s fall 2024 collection. The clock handbag brings home the “Garden of Time” theme.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Singer-songwriter Tyla took the “Garden of Time” theme to its literal extreme with her Balmain dress made of sculpted sand, accessorized with an hourglass clutch.
(Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images)
Actor Colman Domingo went through awards season killing it with every red carpet appearance and now he’s showing how to properly slay wearing a cape, no superhero role required. His bouquet of calla lilies brings home the garden theme.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Rebecca Ferguson goes for the spooky look in a Thom Browne couture gown and cape ensemble that reportedly needed 30 craftsmen, who worked thousands of hours to cover it with 60,000 crystals and 7,000 ravens made of raffia. The genius bit? The beading at the shoulders that looks so like feathers.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Ayo Edebiri blooms in a backless, floor-length sweep of floral embellishment, designed by Jonathan Anderson for Loewe.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Jamie Dornan may play sexy bad boys, but with his pinstriped trousers, knee-length tailcoat and nubby vest, he’s giving Winston Churchill vibes.
(Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
You can count on style icon Sarah Jessica Parker to put the “costume” in costume ball. She looks royal with a Richard Quinn gown puffed to enormous volume with an internal pannier, golden fascinator, matching Victorian boots and a strand of pearls nearly twice her height.
(Kevin Mazur/MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Among the many men who are adding adornment to their lapels (a trend that gained ground during recent awards shows), actor Mike Faist (“Challengers”) pins a radish-shaped brooch on his Loewe double-breasted blazer, which he paired with white trousers.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
If you love visual puns, you’ll love how “Challengers” star Josh O’Connor wears a tailcoat with extended “tails” that drag the carpet. His low-heel, floral booties are likely the envy of every woman in heels.
(Kevin Mazur/MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Director Baz Luhrmann and wife Catherine Martin, an Oscar-winning costume and production designer, coordinate in custom Prada in garden shades of green.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Maleah Joi Moon, star of Broadway’s Alicia Keys musical “Hell’s Kitchen,” knows how to make an entrance with her Collina Strada gown and it’s extra-long train.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Jack Harlow makes a convincing argument for a new tone of tuxedo — dove gray, a signature color of its maker, the house of Dior.
(Kevin Mazur/MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Donald Glover shows how the colors of rich earth — peat moss brown and tan clay — work in a fluid, double-breasted ‘90s style suit with wide trouser legs and the era’s wide tie, all by Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello.
(Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Teyana Taylor, the actor and singer-songwriter who contributed vocals to “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” wears a red-on-red look that could be described similarly.
(Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Designer Tory Burch channeled the iridescent wings of butterflies for Uma Thurman’s periwinkle dress, which features a corset, intricate pleats and a profusion of the delicate (faux) insects fluttering at her shoulders.
(Kevin Mazur/MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Broadway veterans and married couple Morgan Spector and Rebecca Hall go big, really big, with the floral theme. His is an oversized Willy Chavarría suit with lapel poppies and hers an ethereal Danielle Frankel strapless silk organza gown with a train of printed and hand-painted flowers flowing yards behind her.
(Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
Movie Reviews
Miyamoto says he was surprised Mario Galaxy Movie reviews were even harsher than the first | VGC
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says he’s surprised at the negative critical reception to the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
As reported by Famitsu, Miyamoto conducted a group interview with Japanese media to mark the local release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
During the interview, Miyamoto was asked for his views on the critical reception to the film in the West, where critics’ reviews have been mostly negative.
Miyamoto replied that while he understood some of the negative points aimed at The Super Mario Bros Movie, he thought the reception would be better for the sequel.
“It’s true: the situation is indeed very similar,” he said. “Actually, regarding the previous film, I felt that the critics’ opinions did hold some validity. “However, I thought things would be different this time around—only to find that the criticism is even harsher than it was before.
“It really is quite baffling: here we are—having crossed over from a different field—working hard with the specific aim of helping to revitalize the film industry, yet the very people who ought to be championing that cause seem to be the ones taking a passive stance.”
As was the case with the first film, opinion is divided between critics and the public on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. On review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has a critics’ score of 43% , while its audience score is 89%.
While this is down from the first film’s scores (which were 59% critics and 95% public) it does still appear to imply that the film’s target audience is generally enjoying it despite critical negativity.
The negative reception is unlikely to bother Universal and Illumination too much, considering the film currently has a global box office of $752 million before even releasing in Japan, meaning a $1 billion global gross is becoming increasingly likely.
Elsewhere in the interview, Miyamoto said he hoped the film would perform well in Japan, especially because it has a unique script rather than a simple localization as in other regions.
“The Japanese version is a bit unique,” he said. “Normally, we create an English version and then localize it for each country, but for the first film, we developed the English and Japanese scripts simultaneously. For this film, we didn’t simply localize the completed English version – instead, we rewrote it entirely in Japanese to create a special Japanese version.
“So, if this doesn’t become a hit in Japan, I feel a sense of pressure – as the person in charge of the Japanese version – to not let [Illumination CEO and film co-producer] Chris [Meledandri] down.
“However, judging by the reactions of the audience members who’ve seen it, I feel that Mario fans are really embracing it. I also believe we’ve created a film that people can enjoy even if they haven’t seen the previous one, so I’m hopeful about that as well.”
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
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First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
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