We tend to think of the gala as a modern creature, a thing of step and repeat carpets, themed dress codes and seven figure fundraising totals. In its present form it largely is. Yet the idea behind it, that the glittering few should gather on a fixed night, put on their finest and turn an evening of pleasure toward some larger purpose, is far older than the Met steps or the Cannes croisette. It reaches back through the charity ball and the Gilded Age ballroom to the assembly rooms of Georgian Europe, and the story of how those threads were gathered together tells us a great deal about how the rich came to be seen, and how being seen came to mean giving.

A word for finery

The word itself carries its meaning lightly. It comes through the Old French gale, a word for rejoicing and merriment, and the Italian gala, which meant festive dress and fine show. To be in gala was to be in one’s best, turned out for a day set apart from ordinary time. A gala day or a gala night was a public festivity, an occasion when a town or a court dressed up and put itself on display, and the word kept that double sense of splendour and spectacle long before anyone thought to attach a charitable cause to it.

That older meaning matters, because the gala has always been about appearance as much as purpose. To hold one is to believe that an evening of beauty, carefully staged and richly dressed, is worth the trouble and the expense, and that the act of gathering people to look and be looked at can be made to carry weight. Everything that followed, from the marriage market to the museum benefit, is built on that simple and slightly theatrical foundation.

The ballroom and the assembly

The machinery arrived in the eighteenth century, in the form of the assembly. As cities grew, the well born and the well off needed somewhere to meet, dance and take one another’s measure, and the public assembly rooms supplied it. London’s most famous, Almack’s, opened in the seventeen sixties and ran on a brilliant and ruthless principle. A small committee of aristocratic lady patronesses decided who received a voucher and who did not, and an evening of dancing became a closely guarded gate through which the right families passed and the wrong ones were turned away.

Out of this grew the season, the annual round of balls, dinners and presentations through which young women of good family were introduced to society and, with luck, to a husband. The debutante in her white dress, the careful choreography of the dance card, the curtsy practised for months, all of it was a courtship ritual dressed as a party. The ball was never only a pleasure. It was the place where reputations were made, fortunes joined and the boundaries of a class quietly policed, and the modern gala still carries that memory of the velvet rope in its bones.

Mrs. Astor and the age of the ball

Nowhere did the ball become a more naked instrument of power than in Gilded Age New York. After the Civil War a tidal wave of new money washed into the city, and the older families faced a question that has no easy answer in a republic, namely how to be an aristocracy without a crown. Their solution was social, and its high priestess was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, known simply as the Mrs. Astor, who with the help of the self appointed arbiter Ward McAllister set about deciding who belonged.

Together they created the Patriarchs, whose subscription balls were the most coveted invitations in America, and the famous Four Hundred, the list of those deemed socially acceptable, said to be the number who could fit comfortably into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. An invitation was a passport and exclusion was banishment. The newspapers, hungry for the doings of the rich, turned this small world into a public spectacle and its members into the country’s first celebrities. The ball had become the engine of social standing, and the press had learned that the public would happily watch.

From the ball to the benefit

The turn from display toward charity was gradual and, in a sense, inevitable. The grand ball had always carried a whiff of patronage and obligation, and it was a short step from throwing a party for one’s peers to throwing one in aid of a hospital, an orphanage or a relief fund. The nineteenth century was thick with charitable festival dinners and benefit nights, and as the middle class grew and the Industrial Revolution widened the circle of people with money to give, the charity ball spread from the aristocracy outward into the civic life of towns on both sides of the Atlantic.

By the middle of the twentieth century the form had hardened into something recognisable. A committee, usually of women, would choose a cause, secure a grand venue, sell tickets at a price that signalled seriousness, and turn an evening of dinner and dancing into a reliable engine of fundraising. The genius of the arrangement was that it asked nothing uncomfortable of its guests. They were invited to dress beautifully, enjoy themselves and feel virtuous, and the cause was served precisely because the night was a pleasure.

The party as a profession

If the charity ball supplied the purpose, it was a handful of inspired hosts who supplied the art. Chief among them was Elsa Maxwell, a short, plain piano player from the American west who, lacking money and beauty, made herself indispensable to high society by becoming the best party giver alive. She invented the come as you are party, popularised the scavenger hunt and the treasure hunt as entertainments for the rich, built her evenings around themes and stunts, and treated the guest list itself as a work of composition, mixing royalty and movie stars and the merely amusing into something no one wanted to miss.

Maxwell turned the party into a produced spectacle and a media event, and her descendants are everywhere in the modern gala. The lineage runs straight to the most famous private party of the century, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, staged at the Plaza in 1966 in honour of Katharine Graham and flush with the success of In Cold Blood. Capote understood, as Maxwell had, that an evening could be engineered into legend through a strict dress code, a fiercely guarded list and a tidal wave of publicity. The grand party had become an art form with its own auteurs.

The museum learns to throw a party

All of these threads, the exclusive ball, the charitable purpose and the produced spectacle, met in the institution that would define the modern art gala, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1948 the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert organised a midnight supper to raise money for the museum’s newly formed Costume Institute, billed it as the party of the year and charged fifty dollars a head. For its first two decades it was simply one of many benefits on the New York calendar, attended by society figures and fashion insiders and held at hotels and rooms around the city rather than at the Met itself.

The transformation came with Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue editor who became a consultant to the Costume Institute in 1972. She moved the benefit into the museum, tied each evening to the exhibition it opened, introduced the themes that now drive the whole spectacle, and drew in artists, film stars and rock royalty until the guest list crackled. From 1995 the Vogue editor Anna Wintour took the chair and pushed the event further still, fixing it to the first Monday in May, controlling the list and the dress with famous exactitude, and turning the Costume Institute Benefit into the most photographed night in fashion. The point of all that glamour is unembarrassedly practical. The Costume Institute is the one curatorial department at the Met required to fund itself, and the gala is how it pays for its exhibitions, its acquisitions and its galleries, with cumulative contributions now well past two hundred million dollars.

The global gala

What the Met perfected, the world copied. The museum benefit became a fixture of the cultural calendar in every city with art to fund, and the gala spread far beyond the gallery. Opera and ballet companies stage their own glittering nights, from the waltzing splendour of the Vienna Opera Ball to the bal de la Rose in Monaco, a tradition carried down from Grace Kelly and later dressed by Karl Lagerfeld. Causes well outside the arts learned the same lesson, most spectacularly the amfAR galas, whose celebrity studded evenings in Cannes and elsewhere have raised hundreds of millions for AIDS research.

For most of its history the grand benefit was a rare event. Now there are more of them than anyone can count, a whole circuit of black tie evenings stretching across the year and around the globe, each one trying to turn an old and simple wager into new money for a worthy end.

From finery to philanthropy

Read in one sweep, the history of the gala is the story of a festive evening slowly acquiring a conscience. The assembly room gave it the velvet rope, the Gilded Age ballroom gave it the hunger for status and spectacle, the charity ball gave it a cause, and the great hosts gave it the art of the produced night. The museum benefit gathered all of it together and pointed it at something lasting, the survival of the institutions that keep art before the public.

Two tensions have run the length of that story and have never quite been resolved. One is between glamour and good works, the slightly awkward truth that a gala raises money for a cause precisely by indulging the people who attend it. The other is between exclusion and access, the same push and pull over who gets an invitation that animated Mrs. Astor’s ballroom and animates the Met steps today. Every gala, from the assembly at Almack’s to the benefit on Fifth Avenue, is another attempt to hold those tensions in balance, and to make the hopeful bet that an evening of beauty, well staged and well dressed, can be made to do some good in the world.