The Met Gala returning in 2021 — but not on the first Monday in May

This year, for the second consecutive first Monday in May in a row, there will not be a star-studded, high-fashion fundraiser at the Met.

But don't despair! The Met Gala, which marks the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual costume exhibit, hasn't been called off entirely. In fact, fans of the fashion forward night can look forward to two galas — the first on September 13, the second Monday in September, and the second on May 2, 2022.

The accompanying exhibit — "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion" — will open September 18, in the Anna Wintour Costume Center. It will celebrate The Costume Institute's 75th anniversary.

"Over the past year, because of the pandemic, the connections to our homes have become more emotional, as have those to our clothes. For American fashion, this has meant an increased emphasis on sentiment over practicality. Responding to this shift, Part One of the exhibition will establish a modern vocabulary of American fashion based on the expressive qualities of clothing as well as deeper associations with issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion," Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, said in a statement.

The new date for the first installment will mark the finale of an abbreviated New York Fashion Week, which will surely make for a particularly high-impact comeback moment. Fashion presentations of the last year have been unconventional, to say the least, as a hard-hit industry found its footing and adjusted to a new future amid the pandemic; the Met Gala, too, didn't go according to plan in 2020.

The Costume Institute announced the exhibit "About Time: Fashion and Duration" in October 2019 before indefinitely postponing the launch event in March of last year and then canceling entirely two months later, though Vogue marked the moment virtually with a fundraising YouTube livestream entitled "A Moment with the Met." Along with Wintour, the event's co-chairs were set to be Louis Vuitton creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, Emma Stone, Meryl Streep, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The exhibit for part 2 — "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" opens May 5, 2022, three days after the second Met Gala, examining the men and women's dress from the 18th century until the present.

"Part Two will further investigate the evolving language of American fashion through a series of collaborations with American film directors who will visualize the unfinished stories inherent in The Met's period rooms," Bolton's statement concluded.

The most recent in-person Met Gala took place in 2019 and was dedicated to the exhibit entitled "Camp: Notes on Fashion." Co-chair Lady Gaga stole the show with an elaborately staged performance involving three wardrobe changes right there on the pink carpet. In 2018, "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" was an unforgettable sartorial sacrament, which featured Rihanna and Chadwick Boseman in papal white, Katy Perry as a winged angel, Zendaya à la Joan of Arc, and Ariana Grande wearing the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

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