#ThrowbackThursday: 10 Steal-Worthy Event Design Ideas from the Met Gala

While fashion's biggest night of the year has been postponed due to COVID-19, we're still celebrating with a look back at 10 of the event's most steal-worthy event design moments over the years.

Ashton Pike

April 30, 2020

If it were any other year on the first Monday in May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be filled to the brim with top-tier celebrities, fashion powerhouses, and media moguls alike, all donning their on-theme and typically avant-garde couture. While the postponement of the iconic Met Gala due to the coronavirus outbreak will leave the New York venue wistfully empty this year, we're taking a look back at 10 of the glamorous fete's most inspirational event design moments over the years. (Putting on your black-tie best and grabbing a glass of Champagne while you read through is completely optional—but definitely encouraged and, we'd like to think, Anna Wintour-approved.)

2019 Met Gala

The 2019 Costume Institute Benefit featured a camp theme with pink decor galore. Raul Avila, who has produced the benefit decor since 2007, created the design for the benefit in collaboration with Jan Versweyveld, who designed the exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion. Avila went with natural wood ballroom chairs that featured cushions covered with six different flamingo-printed patterns. The centerpieces contained tropical plants including a variety of ginger species. Pink tablecloths were set with chargers printed with floral branches, painted pink glassware, bamboo flatware, feather-decorated lampshades, and napkins embroidered with pink flamingos.

Photo: Corey Tenold/Vogue Magazine

2019 Met Gala

For the first time ever, Avila limited himself to basically one color. “Pink comes in different shades and to be able to harmonize the different palettes was an interesting way to not look too exaggerated,” he said. The floral centerpiece featured five 25-foot-tall flamingo statues with pink faux feathers and gold sequins and glitter covering their legs and beaks. See more: See Inside This Year’s Met Gala Filled with Feathers and Flamingos

Photo: Kevin Tachman/Getty Images

2018 Met Gala

For the 2018 Met Gala, the event's design was inspired by the museum’s then-new exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. The crowning jewel (pun intended) of the evening's decor was the 30-foot-high floriated centerpiece created by gala designer Raul Avila and his army of staffers. The structure was inspired by a jeweled tiara that once belonged to Pope Pius IX. “Anna [Wintour] and I, from the beginning, were on the same page with replicating the papal tiara for the Great Hall floral centerpiece,” Avila said. “The tiara is the most striking component of the Pope’s ensemble, and I felt it was appropriate to highlight that given the theme of the exhibition.” See more: See Inside This Year’s 'Heavenly' Met Gala

Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/MG18/Getty Images for the Met Museum/Vogue

2017 Met Gala

The 2017 Met Gala celebrated all things avant-garde with Art of the In-Between dedicated to Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. The benefit was planned by Vogue’s special projects consultant Sylvana Ward Durrett and director of special events Eaddy Kiernan. Ushers donned geometric-shaped black dresses in a further nod to Kawakubo, softened with oversize flower crowns that are all the rage currently. The hand-painted sisal carpet with royal-blue trim featured a blue based on the color of a dress from Comme des Garçons’ Fall 2012 collection.

Photo: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFA

2017 Met Gala

Guests entered the Temple of Dendur for dinner, walking between two walls of off-white flowers covered in 3-D dots made from hot-pink and burgundy roses. A trompe l'oeil royal-blue muslin curtain, highlighted in gold, draped the stage where a performance by Katy Perry would later take place. See more: Met Gala 2017: Inside the Yearlong Process of Designing Fashion’s Biggest Night

Photo: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFA

2016 Met Gala

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 Costume Institute benefit—which celebrated Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology and was produced by Raul Avila—the "red" carpet in the arrivals tent (inspired by a DNA double helix) was patterned and handpainted sisal, with a red-and-pink double helix extending up the steps and into the museum's Great Hall. It took six months to stencil the carpet, a first for Avila and his team. "We decided for the first time to bring the helix concept to guests the moment they arrived," said Avila, the Met Gala's long-standing producer. "It’s the party of the year, so you really have to make it look like the party of the year."

Photo: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFA.com/Shutterstock

2016 Met Gala

For dinner, guests entered the Temple of Dendur through an arched doorway in a 70-by-20-by-10-foot wall made of 300,000 roses. Because no props could be hung from the ceiling in the room, decor was largely grounded to the floor. To maintain longevity, the roses were conditioned at Avila's Brooklyn studio for three days, then cut on Sunday morning and set in an environment where moisture was closely regulated. The wall was installed later that day. The roses on the wall ranged from white to lavender to red, and extended from north to south across the entire width of the room. In total, 250 people spent 200 hours setting up, which amounted to 50,000 hours total. See more: See How Tech and Fashion Mixed at the Met Gala

Photo: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFA.com/Shutterstock

2015 Met Gala

At the 2015 Met Gala, themed after the exhibit China: Through the Looking Glass, dinner tables covered with de Gournay tablecloths featured centerpieces of red peonies in blue and white porcelain vases and chargers holding gold-rimmed plates. Gold was used sparingly as to avoid being cliché. See more: How the Met Gala Avoided Chinese Clichés

Photo: BFA

2012 Met Gala

In 2012, the museum presented Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, which explored the aesthetic similarities between designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada. For the gala dinner, held in the museum's Temple of Dendur, the chairs were upholstered with many of Prada's popular prints and were complemented by bright poppies and anemones on the tables, creating a whimsical feel that mimicked both women's fashion sensibilities. See more: Met Ball Uses 200,000 Roses to Craft Surreal Look Honoring Prada, Schiaparelli

Photo: Eric Boman

2007 Met Gala

For the museum's 2007 tribute to French couturier Paul Poiret, four peacocks perched in a gilded cage, which was surrounded by more than 12,000 red roses—the designer's personal emblem. In the book's introduction, Vogue editor-in-chief and Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour recalls an event planner's nightmare: the pride of peacocks going AWOL in Central Park before the gala. See more: Behind the Scenes at the Met Gala and Its Inspirational Exhibitions

Photo: Billy Farrell/PatrickMcMullan.com