Meta Gala 2020 Postponed Due to Coronavirus Pandemic

This year’s Met Gala has been officially postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event’s co-chair Anna Wintour confirmed on Monday. This year’s gala was scheduled to take place on May 4. The Met Gala is hosted by Wintour and a selection of co-chairs who this year include Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emma Stone, Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière and Meryl Streep, whose appearance would be her first-ever at the event.

“One day that will not arrive on schedule will be the opening of the Costume Institute’s exhibition, About Time,” Wintour wrote for Vogue in a piece reflecting on the coronavirus outbreak. “Due to the unavoidable and responsible decision by the Metropolitan Museum to close its doors, About Time, and the opening night gala, will not take place on the date scheduled.”

This year’s theme is time itself, titled, “About Time: Fashion and Duration.”

“This exhibition will consider the ephemeral nature of fashion, employing flashbacks and fast-forwards to reveal how it can be both linear and cyclical,” Max Hollein, director of the Met, said of the corresponding exhibit, via The Cut. The exhibit was scheduled to open on May 7 and run through Sept. 7. The night of the Met Gala, the first Monday in May, is the only night the museum closes for the entire year besides Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.

The Met and its sister museums, the Met Breuer and the Met Cloisters, closed on March 13 and the Museum is currently scheduled to remain closed through April 4. Vogue reports that “in deference to this guidance, all programs and events through May 15 will be canceled or postponed,” according to a Met spokesperson.

As of last week, the gala was still proceeding as scheduled.

“We are proceeding as planned and look forward to a wonderful evening,” Nancy Chilton, the Met Costume Institute’s chief external relations officer, told the Cut at the time. “We will, of course, continue to keep a close eye on the situation.”

Over 150,000 cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide and over 3,500 in the United States. On March 15, the CDC recommended that all public gatherings of over 50 people be canceled for the next eight weeks and New York governor Andrew Cuomo called for a statewide shut down of non-essential businesses and also banned crowds over 50, effectively rendering the gala impossible on its originally scheduled evening.

Photo Credit: Getty / Mike Coppola