The Met Gala, Vogue’s yearly fashion event that is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, is returning. After pausing last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gala is happening on September 13, making it the first time in 16 years that it’s not taking place on the first Monday in May. Other big changes are afoot as well, as the co-chairs are younger than ever before. Among them are 23-year-old poet/author Amanda Gorman and tennis star Naomi Osaka.
“Met Gala here we come,” Gorman wrote on Instagram. “[H]onored to co-host alongside giants.” The additional co-chairs are multi-platinum-selling singer Billie Eilish and 25-year-old Call Me By Your Name actor Timothée Chalamet.
There have only been 7 Black co-chairs since Vogue‘s Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour began chairing the Met Gala in 1995. They are: former GAP president Patrick Robinson (2010), media mogul Oprah Winfrey (2010), singer/entrepreneur Beyoncé (2013), actor Idris Elba (2016), producer Pharrell Williams (2017), singer/entrepreneur and former Essence cover star Rihanna (2018) and athlete Serena Williams (2019).
This year’s theme/title is “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” and will honor contemporary American fashion.
Gorman was the nation’s Youth Poet Laureate in 2017 and skyrocketed to stardom after delivering an original poem at the 2021 presidential inauguration in January. “Amanda Gorman is a young woman who stepped into a moment in history with enormous grace and dignity,” Oprah Winfrey in a press release sent to ESSENCE after interviewing Gorman. “I was enthralled by her youthful spirit from the first moment we met.”
After her big moment at the top of the year, Gorman made history as the first person to perform a poem at the Super Bowl and then covered Time Magazine in February. She is currently signed as a model to IGM.
Photo credit: Getty Images/Leon Bennett/WireImage