The Metropolitan Museum presents a Gala to benefit the museum’s Costume Institute on May 7, 2012.
To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada’s Impossible Conversations, the Museum’s Costume Institute Benefit takes place on Monday, May 7, 2012. For the first time in its history, red carpet arrivals will be live streamed from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on metmuseum.org, amazon.com/fashion, and vogue.com. The evening’s Honorary Chair is Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. Co-Chairs are actress Carey Mulligan, designer Miuccia Prada, and Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue. This fundraising event is The Costume Institute’s main source of annual funding for exhibitions, acquisitions, and capital improvements.
The exhibition is organized by Harold Koda, Curator in Charge, and Andrew Bolton, Curator, both of the Met’s Costume Institute. Film director, screenwriter, and producer Baz Luhrmann is the exhibition’s creative consultant, and has created a series of filmed elements for the exhibition. The production design for the films is by Luhrmann’s longtime collaborator, Catherine Martin. The exhibition design is realized by Nathan Crowley, who serves as production designer (he was creative consultant for the Met’s exhibitions Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity). All mannequin head treatments and masks are designed by Guido Palau.
The design for the 2012 Costume Institute Gala Benefit is created by Crowley and Raul Avila (who has produced the Benefit décor since 2007) with Luhrmann as creative consultant.
The Met’s website includes special, in-depth features on the exhibition: www.metmuseum.org/impossibleconversations