A couple of months ago we did a social media analysis of the Oscars ceremony, and now it is time for the “fashion Oscars” social media analysis as well! Of course, we’re talking about Met Gala.
The first Monday in May is reserved for the grandiose event that everyone in Hollywood and the fashion industry wants to be a part of. Individual tickets for Met Gala go up to $35 000 and all of the proceeds are going to charity. But, if you’re not on Anna Wintour’s guest list, forget about it.
The theme
Each year, there is a new dress code for the guests which corresponds with the exhibit displayed in the Metropolitan Musem of Art in New York for a year. This years theme was “Camp: Notes on Fashion”. Usually, the themes are quite self-explanatory and understandable, but this years theme put question marks around people’s heads. At first, I thought it has something to do with camping, tents, nature and all the things that go along with it, but it is actually inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay that defines camp as “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”.
The curator of the Costume Institute Andrew Bolton explained it for the NYT: “We are going through an extreme camp moment, and it felt very relevant to the cultural conversation to look at what is often dismissed as empty frivolity but can be actually a very sophisticated and powerful political tool, especially for marginalized cultures.”
The analysis
Since Met Gala is quite a popular event, we did an analysis of what social media had to say.
As you can see in the graph below, there was a huge spike in mentions of Met Gala.
There were over 40 000 online mentions, with the number of impressions going over 1 billion. The countries in which people were mostly discussing it was the US (22 782), United Kingdom (2411) and Italy (1508).
Little over 50% of all online mentions were posted on Twitter, followed by Web (35.4%).
It seems people really liked this year’s theme and outfits because the predominant sentiment of the mentions was positive (84.6%).
When doing this type of analysis, the most fun part is scrolling through the mentions, because a lot of posts tend to be hilarious. Especially for this event, since it is a huge inspiration for online memes in the last couple of years.
Here are a few gems that I found:
Finally, in the Word Cloud below, you can see the most mentioned words relating to Met Gala. Three most mentioned people were Lady Gaga (she was also a co-chair of the event and changed four outfits in 15 minutes!), Harry Styles (also a co-chair) and a Chinese singer Lay Zhang (it was his Met Gala debut).
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