How (and why) to watch the Met Gala this year

Happy first Monday in May, fashion lovers! And for the fashion agnostic, welcome nevertheless to a new month, which coincidentally also falls on Met Gala day. The time-honored tradition, led in the last few decades by Vogue’s Anna Wintour, brings together the brightest stars in fashion and entertainment to raise money for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The parade of Beautiful People can be viewed from the comfort of your own sweatpants via Vogue’s livestream on its website, YouTube page, or any attendant social media. Or, if you’re nasty, you can just keep refreshing your own Twitter feed to find the best looks.

This year’s event is a tribute to late designer Karl Lagerfeld, with the dress code specifically “In honor of Karl.” Inside the Met, attendees will get to peruse a newly curated exhibit “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” which features 150 of Lagerfeld’s designs with his original sketches. (Lagerfeld was a figure not without controversy, as Time points out; he had a history of racism, misogyny, and fatphobia.) Wintour’s co-chairs this year include pop star Dua Lipa, I May Destroy You creator and star Michaela Coel, tennis player Roger Federer, and Oscar winner Penelope Cruz, a longtime ambassador for Chanel, the fashion house where Lagerfeld served as creative director and which is sponsoring the event.

The Met Gala, or Met Ball, was founded in 1948 to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute. The concept of yearly themes was established in the 1970s; those themes have ranged from celebrations of specific designers to epochs of fashion to certain design sensibilities. Recent years include “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” and “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”

Tickets are reportedly $50,000 per attendee or $300,000 a table (per Forbes). For the fashion-forward or celebrity-obsessed that don’t have half a grand lying around, it’s an enjoyable occasion to evaluate the various looks from “most on the money” (e.g., Lady Gaga’s multilayered camp performance) to “completely missed the mark” (e.g., Karlie Kloss’ attempt to look camp right in the eye). The festivities begin Monday night at 6 P.M. EST.