Lifestyle
Beyoncé Is Returning to the Met Gala. These Are the Looks She Has to Top.
In her own words: “She coming.”
After Beyoncé dropped the cryptic two-word tease in advance of her latest tour, the phrase quickly became one of her fans’ favorite ways to express their excitement for her next move.
So when it was revealed that she was going to attend this year’s Met Gala as an event co-chair, red carpet watchers saw the potential for much more than a simple party appearance.
In the past week, speculation making the rounds online has been imaginative: Will she be dropping her first single in two years? Will she use the occasion to announce an album? A tour? Perhaps Blue Ivy will be accompanying her? (That last one is unlikely, as minors typically aren’t allowed in.)
Whatever it is that will or won’t be announced, it has been 10 years since Beyoncé attended the event, a starry fund-raiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fashion-minded Costume Institute, and her fans are starved to see her in something besides a polished Instagram post.
All eyes will be on the pop star to see how she interprets this year’s dress code, “Fashion Is Art.” Over her seven previous Met Gala appearances, Beyoncé’s ensembles have evolved from minimal elegance to more bold and daring garments with the help of a longtime stylist and a Givenchy creative director.
Below, a look through Beyoncé’s Met Gala history, and where the appearances fit into her singular career trajectory.
2008
Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy
Armani Privé
Beyoncé attended her first Met Gala in May 2008 wearing a blush pink strapless Armani Privé gown with a sweetheart neckline and a train that resembled a cape — a nod to that year’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, which examined the parallels between fashion and superheroes.
At the time, the Marvel cinematic universe was in its infancy — the first “Iron Man” film was released just three days earlier — and the global recession was on the horizon. It was also six months before Beyoncé released her third studio album, “I Am … Sasha Fierce,” and just one month after Beyoncé and Jay-Z were married in a private ceremony in TriBeCa.
Her understated, elegant look by Giorgio Armani, who was an honorary chair of the event, preceded the release of her smash hit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” which helped propel her into an entirely different tier of superstardom.
2011
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
Pucci
After finishing up her “I Am …” world tour and creating her own management and production company, Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé returned to the Met Gala carpet three years later wearing a black Emilio Pucci mermaid gown with gold embroidery, black sequins and a keyhole cutout across her chest.
The look was in honor of the evening’s larger theme celebrating Alexander McQueen, the British fashion designer who died at 40 and was acclaimed for his provocative women’s wear collections. Because of the dress’s fishtail design, Beyoncé at times struggled to walk up the red-carpet stairs upon arrival. So with the help of Jay-Z and Ty Hunter, her stylist at the time, she was finally able to make her way inside.
Later that year, Beyoncé would also release her fourth studio album, “4,” and announce her pregnancy while performing at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards.
Beyoncé, who was rehearsing for her next tour and wasn’t originally planning to attend the 2012 gala, decided at the last minute that she wanted to go, her former stylist told WWD.
“Literally within a day or a couple of hours all of that happened — and it ended up being one of her most talked-about looks,” he told the magazine in 2017.
The look in question was a sheer, embellished Givenchy gown with a black and purple feathered train. That year’s exhibition put the iconoclastic designs of Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, two Italian fashion designers, in conversation.
This would be the first of five Givenchy gowns she would wear to future Met Galas, and an early peek into what would become a close relationship with the Italian designer Riccardo Tisci, the house’s creative director until 2017.
2013
Punk: Chaos to Couture
Givenchy
A few months after headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé served as honorary chair at the 2013 gala, which looked at the sartorial impact of punk culture since its emergence in the 1970s.
“Although punk’s democracy stands in opposition to fashion’s autocracy, designers continue to appropriate punk’s aesthetic vocabulary to capture its youthful rebelliousness and aggressive forcefulness,” Andrew Bolton, now the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, said in a statement at the time.
Teaming up with Givenchy again, the pop star wore a custom gown with fiery detailing, a strapless corset bodice and matching elbow-length gloves and thigh-high boots.
2014
Charles James: Beyond Fashion
Givenchy
Charles James was a visionary 20th-century Anglo-American couturier who took sculptural and mathematical approaches to designing his ball gowns and would describe his style as many things, including “a high form of eroticism.”
Rising to the occasion for the 2014 Met Gala in his honor, Beyoncé arrived wearing a sheer black Givenchy ensemble with black sparkly embellishments, a deep plunging neckline and a cinched waist. Her hair, which was pulled back into a bun, was covered by a black netted veil.
She was accompanied by her husband, and her sister, Solange Knowles, was also in attendance. The three would go on to make headlines after Solange got into a physical altercation with Jay-Z, as the three rode in an elevator together after the gala. Footage of the ordeal was later leaked to the public, causing rabid speculation about the state of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s relationship.
Beyoncé arrived at the 2015 gala wearing a head-turning, custom-made gown that was almost entirely sheer, adorned only with carefully placed multicolored Swarovski crystals.
That spring’s exhibition, which examined how Chinese art and film have influenced Western fashion design, resulted in some of the most memorable Met Gala looks to date, including Rihanna’s canary yellow robe gown by Guo Pei and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Philip Treacy headpiece.
That year’s Met Gala also highlighted the growing power of social media, marking the first time #MetGala was a worldwide trending topic on Twitter, with around 1.5 million tweets posted with the hashtag, according to the museum.
With her and Jay-Z’s last-minute red carpet arrival and one year after the elevator incident, all eyes were on them as they made their way inside.
2016
Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology
Givenchy
Less than a month after the surprise release of “Lemonade,” Beyoncé’s sixth album, on which she recounts an emotional journey through marital betrayal, she arrived to what would be her final Met Gala for a decade.
In the spirit of the corresponding exhibition, an exploration of “how designers are reconciling the handmade and the machine-made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear,” Beyoncé wore a custom latex Givenchy gown with a mermaid silhouette, puffed sleeves and pink florals displayed throughout.
The dress was embellished with hundreds of pearls, and the color of the gown contrasted with her smoky eye shadow. Of course, she arrived fashionably late and unaccompanied, and posed for a few photos before heading inside.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
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On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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