Met Gala invitation or not, ‘football is fashion’ in the women’s game
The first Monday in May may not hold much significance in the world of football, but in the fashion realm, it may as well be the World Cup. Every year on that date, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosts the Met Gala , a grandiose fundraiser for its Costume Institute where hundreds of A-list celebrities across the film and television, fashion, and art worlds converge for a night of self-indulgent glamour. The event doubles as the official unveiling of the institute’s newest exhibition, the theme of which — in this case, “Costume Art” — informing the event’s dress code as well.
Beyoncé, Venus Williams, Nicole Kidman, and former Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna Wintour co-chaired this year’s Met Gala, setting the tone for the event and curating the coveted guest list. The dress code was “Fashion is Art,” a directive loose enough to elicit myriad interpretations but focused enough to guarantee entertaining looks to carry the evening. Heidi Klum went as a sculpture, working with Oscar-nominated makeup artist Mike Marino to recreate the “Veiled Vestal” by Raffaele Monti.
Fellow supermodel Anok Yai also opted for a literal expression of the statuesque nature of her work, dressed as a Black Madonna in Balenciaga. Olympic figure skating gold medalist Alysa Liu took a creative approach with her sanguine Louis Vuitton gown, the tightly wound ruffles of her skirt emulating the muscle tissue she relies on daily to practice her art. According to the Met’s announcement from February, the theme is meant to “examine the centrality of the dressed body, juxtaposing garments and works of art from across the museum’s vast collection to create pairings that not only illuminate the indivisible connection between clothing and the body but also the complex interplay between artistic representations of the body and fashion as an embodied artform.
” Is that not football at its best, whether the canvas is a grassy pitch or a leatherbound boot stroking a ball like a paintbrush? Football is Fashion Megan Rapinoe’s attendance at the 2021 Met Gala felt like turning a corner after years of virtually no presence of the women’s game on fashion’s biggest night. Dressed in a fiery red silk Sergio Hudson pantsuit with a blue star-spangled button-down shirt and, crucially, a blue enamel clutch emblazoned with “America” on one side and “In Gay We Trust on the other, the two-time World Cup winner interpreted that year’s “American Independence” theme with the audacious irony for which she is known.
(To her credit, Alex Morgan appeared at the 2016 Met Gala in a stunning if not standard white embellished Cristian Siriano gown for that year’s “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” assignment. ) Five years on from Rapinoe’s Met Gala, women’s football doesn’t appear to have wedged its boot much further into this hyper-exclusive corner of the fashion world. And that might be OK for now, because its influence might still be the most potent it’s ever been.
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