The 2020 Met Gala Is Basically Meryl Streep-Themed

Though we’re still recovering from this year’s Met gala (Human chandeliers! Dismembered heads! SO. MUCH. GAGA.), it’s already time to look ahead to 2020, and a theme that may be even more elusive than Camp.

The 2020 gala, which will take place on May 4 (cue the Star Wars/Vogue crossover tweets), kicks off the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit About Time: Fashion and Duration. But despite the simplicity of the exhibit’s title, the gala will hardly be your garden variety costume party.

About Time: Fashion and Duration will track the progression of fashion from 1870 to the present, acting as a tribute to the Met on the year of its 150th anniversary. “Employing philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of la durée—time that flows, accumulates, and is indivisible—the exhibition will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate the past, present, and future,” a release describes.

And if you feared this year’s gala would only host the typical celebrities, tastemakers, and Vogue staffers of years past, rest easy, for Virginia Woolf will, I quote, “serve as the ‘ghost narrator’ of the exhibition.” Literary apparitions-turned-museum guides will be all the rage in 2020? Michael Cunningham (a living man), who wrote The Hours based on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, will provide a new short story to align with the exhibit’s theme.

Serving as the obvious link between Vogue and Virginia Wolff, The Hours and Devil Wears Prada star Meryl Streep will act as a co-chair for the event alongside Emma Stone, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Louis Vuitton's Nicolas Ghesquière, and Anna Wintour.

RELATED: See Every Outrageous Red Carpet Look from the 2019 Met Gala

So, how does one dress on-theme for About Time: Fashion and Duration? Treat it as an Hours theme party, probably. Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose deserves a comeback. Realistically, clock iconography will probably be major. I don’t know if Flavor Flav has been waiting on a Met gala invitation, but this could be his year.