The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Monday’s Met Gala theme, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” in November. The theme refers to fashion that now lies dormant, including the fragile pieces being preserved by the Costume Institute. The galleries of the corresponding exhibit take visitors through rooms organized by themes of nature that feature poppies, roses, beetles and butterflies. The dress code for the Gala is “The Garden of Time.”
Designer Prabal Gurung dressed eight women for the Gala. For the look worn by tennis star Maria Sharapova, he took a playful approach to the “sleep” aspect of the “Sleeping Beauties” theme.
“I imagined this beautiful person, this girl in the garden awakened. What would she be sleeping on? [And I thought], ‘Should we just make it from bed sheets?’ But I wanted it to be luxe. I work with cotton a lot — I grew up in Nepal and India, and that’s a big staple in what we wear,” Gurung said.
A friend introduced him to a representative from Boll & Branch, and the 10-year-old bedding company sent Gurung its fabrics. As he learned more about the home company’s mission — it is sustainably made and certified organic, and it recently made all of its fabrics trackable by the consumer — he felt a collaboration was a perfect fit.
“Fashion is not just about what you wear, but it’s also how you wear [it] and what kind of stuff you choose to wear, especially now,” he said.
For the dress, Gurung decided to run with a yellow cotton fabric Boll & Branch will officially launch in June, dubbed Summit Supima Cotton. A limited number of sets of the new bedding are available now. The Met Gala offers the brand a major stage for the fabric’s debut — an opportunity it’s leveraging by offering the fabric on pre-order starting on Monday evening. The product page’s copy will state: “Chosen by Prabal Gurung for his atelier gown, which debuted on this year’s Met Gala red carpet, our Summit Supima fabric combines innovation and tradition for an experience that is exceptional in every way.”
Boll & Branch co-founder and chief designer Missy Tannen said, “It’s not like [Maria will be] wearing sheets. [She’ll be] wearing exceptionally gorgeous organic cotton fabric with no harmful chemicals or pesticides.”
Speaking about the company’s ethical production processes, she added, “Prabal could have selected any other fabric maker out there. … [He knows] everyone who has touched that fabric has a better livelihood for it.”
Earlier on Monday, Sharapova posted to Instagram a sponsored image from her NYC hotel room, where the brand had replaced all of the bedding and robes and supplied personalized pajamas. “Wakey wakey …it’s the morning of the Met Gala ✨,” she began the caption. Sharapova has 4.6 million Instagram followers.
Boll & Branch (300,000 Instagram followers) also began teasing its involvement with the Gala early on Monday. In an Instagram Story, it wrote, “Don’t miss the world’s most luxurious fabric make its red carpet debut on fashion’s biggest night out.”
Boll & Branch’s partnerships with Gurung and Sharapova will extend beyond tonight, said Katia Unlu, Boll & Branch’s chief commercial officer. “You may see us show up in Prabal’s show down the road, maybe at FIT with him doing something,” she hinted, declining to elaborate.
Ahead of the Gala, she said, Boll & Branch will have team members on hand capturing behind-the-scenes content of Sharapova getting ready.
“Whenever I’m doing a collab, I ask: ‘What are the intentions, and how do the values align?'” Gurung said. “The rest of it is just: ‘Let’s just have fun with it, because life is too short.'”
