Image: Ashmolean's Instagram profile
Each year, on the first Monday in May, the fashion world turns its attention to New York and the Metropolitan Museum’s annual Met Gala. For the past three years in the Ashmolean Museum’s communications office, the following Tuesday has become known as ‘Met Gala post day’.
Our ‘Ashmolean meets the Met Gala’ posts began in 2022 when Digital Communications Manager, Christiane Brittain, first searched for items in our collection that might resemble items worn on the red carpet. Personally, it is one of my favourite workdays of the year as it offers the team a uniquely creative opportunity to hunt through the collections to see what fascinating objects and artworks we can find.
But, as anyone who works with such a large number of objects and archives will appreciate, pulling the post together is a Herculean task that requires knowledge of the collection, a creative eye for detail, and a methodical approach to searching within our digital asset library; all of this with a small turnaround time to have the posts live by mid-afternoon.
...pulling the post together is a Herculean task that requires knowledge of the collection, a creative eye for detail, and a methodical approach to searching within our digital asset library
For this to be possible, our whole digital communications team lends a hand, or rather their eyes! Our first step is to search through the hundreds of images taken from the event and familiarise ourselves with stand-out looks from the evening, or outfits that we feel we could find a match for. Then, the search begins: we might have a specific object or collection in mind, or we scour for items using keyword searches in our collections database.
Zendaya’s 2024 Met gala dress featured a bunch of grapes, and we quickly found a wonderful ancient Egyptian glass beaded object which fortuitously matched the same green and blue tones of the original dress.
Sometimes the objects we find do not, in isolation, immediately jump out as a good match. It takes putting them together with the red-carpet image for it to resonate, or not, as can also be the case. Because of this, not every match we pull together makes the final cut. We aim for about seven to eight slides in the final carousel.
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Over the past three years we have learned that the earlier you can post the images, the better the reach and engagement. This year a larger number of organisations compared their collections and products with the event’s outfits, including the Natural History Museum and British Museum, but also bookshop Waterstones and the positive-news app Goodable. This made it all the more important for us to be one of the earliest to post.
The reaction online has been incredibly positive and enthusiastic, with many people commenting that they now wait for our response to the event every year. On Instagram alone, this year’s post achieved more than 10,000 likes and almost 300 comments. Our Met gala posts have featured on the BBC News more than once, including this year, which is enormously helpful for the Museum.
With the continued enthusiastic responses to the posts, the first Tuesday in May will remain ‘Met Gala post’ day in the communications office at the Ashmolean. We do it not just because it is fun to pull together but because fashion is so often inspired by art, culture and history, and the Ashmolean’s rich collections are enormously relevant to design and art today. By sharing this sort of playful social media post we hope to introduce the Museum’s remarkable collections to fresh audiences around the world.
