When celebrities take to the Met Gala red carpet on May 2, there will likely be no shortage of corset boning and bustles.
That's because the dress code for this year's event, hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, is"Gilded Glamour and White Tie," referencing the lavish era of American fashion in the last decades of the 19th century, when industrialization rapidly amplified the country's wealth gap.
The Gilded Age was a 30-year period during which industrialists and real estate magnates saw their fortunes ascend to staggering heights thanks to the rapid expansion of trains, factories, and urban centers. Famous family names including Frick, Astor, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt shaped the country's infrastructure, and the socialites of the era, including Caroline Schermerhorn Astor and Alva Vanderbilt, ruled New York society.
Status symbolsDuring the Gilded Age, you were what you wore, as Strasdin noted it was the period when branding from fashion houses was a novel concept. Many American women at the time bought their status-securing dresses from Paris from the pioneers of haute couture: Charles Worth, Jacques Doucet, Paul Poiret and Madame Jeanne Paquin, the latter of whom showed her innovative modern designs at the 1900s World Fair.
At a time when"old money" scoffed at"nouveau money," like the Vanderbilts' newly amassed railroad fortune, it was important to be well connected with European culture. When Alva Vanderbilt, hoping to be accepted into the top rungs of society, threw a 19th-century rager for her newly completed midtown mansion, dubbed the Petit Chateau, photographs show she wore an elaborate Venetian-style gown meant to mimic Renaissance-era fashions.
Though the movement didn't change public dress codes widely for women, the silhouettes did somewhat catch on in the private homes of wealthy women. Enter the romantic leisurewear staple the"tea gown" — an elaborate precursor to 2020's viral"nap dress" — though, according to Strasdin, many tea gowns still hid"a robust boned bodice" underneath the fabric.
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