Rihanna at the 2018 Met Gala. Photo: HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/Getty Images The 2018 Met Gala at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was an unforgettable event — Rihanna was there, and the theme “Heavenly Bodies” inspired an endless selection of fashion moments. The gala’s accompanying exhibit was debuted that night, with Anna Wintour helming the party, and then remained on display for the public from May until October 8. The Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies” exhibit, which was housed at both the Met Fifth Avenue and Met Cloisters, was the most-visited exhibit in the museum’s history, with 1,659,647 guests. The show even beat out “Treasures of Tutankhamun” from 1978, which had 1,360,957 visitors. “Heavenly Bodies” was also the largest exhibit in the museum’s history, covering 60,000 square feet in 25 galleries. The exhibit was curated by Andrew Bolton, who is the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. The exhibition presented “a dialogue between fashion and masterworks of medieval art in The Met collection to examine fashion’s ongoing engagement with the traditions of Catholicism,” according to the museum.
The Heavenly Bodies exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art was the largest and most visited in the venue's history. More than 1.6 million people visited the show, beating the previous record of 1.3 million for 8 October's Treasures of Tutankhamun. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination was the theme of the exhibition for the Met Gala in May. It remained on show until 1978. The exhibition was a “dialogue between fashion and masterworks of medieval art” the museum said.