Met Gala 2019: This Year's Theme, Celebrity Sightings

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — It's the first Monday in May, which means that much of the world's wealth is conentrated on one block of the Upper East Side for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Costume Institute Benefit.

The theme of this year's Met Gala is "Camp: Notes on Fashion," museum officials said. The foundation for the theme, which is always based on the Costume Institute's annual exhibit, is Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay "Notes on ‘Camp,'" museum officials said.

"Fashion is the most overt and enduring conduit of the camp aesthetic," Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. "Effectively illustrating Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp,”’ the exhibition advances creative and critical dialogue about the ongoing and ever-evolving impact of camp on fashion."

The annual Met Gala is the source of the majority of the Costume Institute's funding, museum officials said. Fashionable celebrities, and the uber-wealthy who want to be seen with them, flock to the museum to be seen wearing extravagant outfits. Individual tickets for the event sell for $30,000 and a table goes for $275,000.

Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, has served as the Met Gala's co-chair since 1995, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website. This year she will be joined by co-chairs Lady Gaga, Alessandro Michele, Harry Styles and Serena Williams.

Following the Met Gala, the "Camp: Note on Fashion" exhibit will open its doors to the plebians from May 9 to Sept. 8. The exhibit features 250 pieces including womenswear, menswear, sculptures, paintings and drawings dating from the 17th century to the present, museum officials said.

"Camp’s disruptive nature and subversion of modern aesthetic values has often been trivialized, but this exhibition reveals that it has had a profound influence on both high art and popular culture," Max Hollein, director of The Met, said in a statement.

Check out The Met's social media channels for a glimpse at what celebrities wore to this year's gala.