Met Gala 2019 preview: Everything you need to know about fashion's biggest night

It's not informally known as fashion's Academy Awards for nothing.

The Met Gala, the annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, may be the single biggest night of the year for fashion, bringing together the top names in entertainment, politics and other high-powered industries for one night of peacocking and partying. 

This year's Met Gala unfolds on May 6 in New York, corresponding with the opening of the museum's new fashion exhibit.

Read on for more information about this year's theme and what to expect.

What is the Met Gala? 

Celebrating its 71st anniversary in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala or the Met Ball, is a black-tie fundraiser for the museum's Costume Institute. Last year's gala raised over $12 million for the Met. The event also celebrates the opening of the Costume Institute's annual fashion exhibit.

The Costume Institute is housed in the museum's Anna Wintour Costume Center, named after the Vogue editor-in-chief. Wintour has served as the Met Gala co-chair nearly every year since 1995, and famously hand-picks the guest list.

How to watch

For viewers at home who want to tune in, E! will begin broadcasting live from the red carpet with Giuliana Rancic at 5 EDT on TV and on Hulu and YouTube TV. 

Viewers without a cable connection can also stream the red carpet via Vogue's Facebook page.

What is this year's theme?

2018's blockbuster "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and Catholic Imagination" theme will be hard to top, but the stars will try their best to interpret 2019's theme, "Camp: Notes on Fashion," which has nothing to do with camping equipment.

"Through more than 250 objects dating from the seventeenth century to the present, The Costume Institute's spring 2019 exhibition will explore the origins of camp's exuberant aesthetic," reads the Met's official website. "Susan Sontag's 1964 essay 'Notes on "Camp" ' provides the framework for the exhibition, which examines how the elements of irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration are expressed in fashion."

Sontag, one of the 20th century's most respected authors and critics, defined camp as "a seriousness that fails," the "taste for the androgynous," and "the love of the unnatural."
 

It's true, the one rule that all #MetGala guests have to follow? No selfies! Says @Vogue's Anna Wintour who recently sat down with @JennaBushHager pic.twitter.com/C6YCQCOIF7

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) May 3, 2019

"It is interesting when you say to people, 'The exhibition this year is going to be on camp,' and you see their minds going, and they're thinking hiking boots, backpacks, rope," Wintour told Jenna Bush Hager on Friday's "Today" show. "It's nothing about nature. It's everything that's completely artificial and fake and not really what you think it means." 

Expect the stars who decide to adhere to this year's theme to embrace Sontag's theory of camp and embody its outrageous and exaggerated spirit, which will inevitably result in some truly eye-popping sartorial choices. 

During Friday's interview, Wintour teased the unusual nature of the requests she's received ahead of this year's gala.

"I know we've had some very strange requests, people arriving on unusual methods of transport," she said, adding that she "of course" says yes to the bizarre asks of the celebrity attendees. "We want them to take risks, to be fearless, to have fun with fashion, and we all need to laugh at ourselves a little bit, too."