Rihanna and A$AP Rocky are known for making a splashy entrance each year on fashion’s biggest night, but the event has unfortunately come and gone without the couple’s arrival.
Although Rihanna recently teased her look for this year’s Met Gala, a source for People confirmed the superstar had to cancel at the last minute after contracting the flu. Fashion is everything—but health does come first.
Since going public with their relationship, Rihanna and Rocky have earned a reputation as one of the best-dressed couples at the Met Gala. For instance, last year, the two embraced the Karl Lagerfeld–dedicated dress code, with Rihanna wearing a dramatic white Maison Valentino gown with a coordinating rosette-covered top. Meanwhile, Rocky referenced one of the late Lagerfeld’s own looks in a high-low red plaid pleated kilt layered over a pair of bedazzled baggy jeans.
This year’s dress code is “The Garden of Time,” a concept inspired by J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same name. In essence, the theme examines the intrinsic connection between time and natural beauty—leaving the door wide open for attendees to interpret the dress code as they please.
“The Garden of Time” also complements the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which will include about “250 objects spanning four centuries” from the institute’s vast collection, all of them “visually united by iconography related to nature, which will serve as a metaphor for the fragility and ephemerality of fashion,” according to a press release. The exhibition will feature a number of modern technologies in its display, too, “from cutting-edge tools, artificial intelligence, and computer-generated imagery to traditional formats of x-rays, video animation, light projection, and soundscapes.”
