The 2022 Met Gala theme, In America: An Anthology of Fashion, is built around the tenets of American style, and celebrates unsung heroes of US design. Even though only eight months will have passed since Kim Kardashian climbed the Met steps in her Balenciaga mask by then, this year’s ceremony will take place on 2 May – a return to the event’s traditional first Monday in May slot after two years of Covid chaos.

Below, everything you need to know about the 2022 Met Gala.

When is the Met Gala 2022?

The 2022 Met Gala will take place on Monday 2 May in New York. It celebrates the second volume in a two-part Costume Institute exhibition. The first, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, opened on 18 September, and was preceded by the 2021 Met Gala on 13 September.

What is the Met Gala 2022 theme?

The theme for part two is In America: An Anthology of Fashion, and the exhibition will see Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s Costume Institute, focus on inclusivity in fashion. “Who gets to be American?” was a question posed at Prabal Gurung’s spring/summer 2020 show, and it will be addressed at the Met Gala 2022, too.

As for the exhibition, presented across 13 of the American period rooms in the museum, it “provides a historical context for Lexicon, in a way”, Bolton told Vogue. “The stories really reflect the evolution of American style, but they also explore the work of individual tailors, dress-makers, and designers,” he says. “What’s exciting for me is that some of the names will be very familiar to students of fashion, like Charles James, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta, but a lot of the other names really have been forgotten, overlooked or relegated into the footnotes of fashion history. So one of the main intentions of the exhibition is to spotlight the talents and contributions of these individuals, and many of them are women.”

Who will host the Met Gala 2022?

We don’t know yet. The co-chairs for the 2022 ceremony – following an ultra Gen Z-friendly line-up last year – are yet to be announced.

When did the Met Gala 2021 take place?

After the 2020 Met Gala was cancelled due to the pandemic, the Costume Institute announced a two-part version for 2021 and 2022. The first exhibition, with a theme of In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, opened on 18 September, and the 2021 Met Gala itself – which was co-chaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman and Naomi Osaka – took place five days earlier on 13 September.

What was the Met Gala 2021 theme?

The theme celebrated American designers, as well as cultural, political and social events that occurred during the pandemic. “The main one was the fact that the American fashion community has been supporting us for 75 years, really since the beginning of the Costume Institute, so I wanted to acknowledge its support, and also to celebrate and reflect upon American fashion,” Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, told Vogue at the time. And he also felt it needed to be revisited (American Ingenuity in 1998 was the last big exhibition to cover the theme).

“I think that the emphasis on conscious creativity was really consolidated during the pandemic and the social justice movements,” Bolton said. “And I’ve been really impressed by American designers’ responses to the social and political climate, particularly around issues of body inclusivity and gender fluidity, and I’m just finding their work very, very self-reflective. I really do believe that American fashion is undergoing a Renaissance. I think young designers, in particular, are at the vanguard of discussions about diversity and inclusion, as well as sustainability and transparency, much more so than their European counterparts, maybe with the exception of the English designers.”