Who doesn’t adore scrolling the Met Gala’s red carpet looks, a hit parade of lavish, and sometimes zany, fashion created by design icons for today’s hottest stars. We’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t privately muse, what would I wear, if given the chance, to fashion’s biggest night out?
On January 11, all your fashion fantasies could be made manifest at the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge’s annual MPAC gala—shorthand for Music, Performance, Art, and Community. The 2024 event draws inspiration from the Met Gala itself, and like the storied Big Apple gathering, it offers a theme to spark sartorial creativity—“Tina Turner, Rollin’ on the River.”
Arts Council president and CEO Renee Chatelain says MPAC raises funds for the Arts Council while celebrating regional arts—from fine art and music to the performing arts and fashion design. The event also encourages attendees to wear something memorable and fun.
“We really want people to just be creative this year, whether they wear a couture gown, come dressed as paparazzi, Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, or dress as their favorite painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Chatelain says. “It’s as much a gathering of community as it is a fundraiser.”
Courtesy of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge
Left to right: Baton Rouge-born designer Christopher John Rogers has said “Those who wear my pieces will always feel empowered.” Work from Rogers’ Spring, 2020 line, presented at New York Fashion Week. Master clothing designer Manuel Martinez. Suzanne Perron St. Paul.
MPAC 2023 celebrated the Arts Council’s 50-year anniversary, and for the first time, introduced an event theme. “Let’s Groove” encouraged ticket holders to cast their memories back to the seventies when the arts organization was founded. Many patrons wore their best bell-bottoms, flower sunglasses, and disco fashion.
The idea of a theme was so popular, Chatelain says, that it was a must for the 2024 event. Sponsors voted on several options, with the winning theme fusing the glamor of the Met Gala with the verve and creativity of the late Tina Turner, whose Proud Mary and its energetic refrain is part of the Mississippi River’s essential soundtrack.
Ticket holders will fan out through the 12,000-square foot Cary Saurage Community Arts Center, where galleries and creative spaces showcase work by area visual and performing artists, and demonstrate the Arts Council’s fervent commitment to supporting the Capital Region’s creative community.
See fine art on display in the Shell Gallery and in artists’ studio spaces. Check out the Jan and Bill Grimes Recording Studio and the Virginia and John Noland Black Box Studio. Enjoy food and drink stationed throughout the building and raise a glass to downtown Baton Rouge from the Turner-Fischer Rooftop Terrace. When you’re ready to dance, head outside for a live band and dancing in the street.
MPAC 2024’s theme is also a reminder that Baton Rouge is a robust territory for fashion design. It’s the birthplace, after all, of acclaimed designer Christopher John Rogers, who designed the inauguration day jacket worn by Vice President Kamala Harris among other impressive accomplishments. It’s where New Orleans-based Suzanne Perron St. Paul, known for exquisite handmade beaded ball gowns, first studied fashion design at LSU. And it’s where master clothing designer Manuel Martinez, a past president of the Custom Tailor and Designer’s Association, and honored twice as a U.S. representative to the World Congress of Tailors in France and Italy, chose to establish his nationally recognized tailoring studio, Martinez Custom Clothier. No surprise that Louisiana—where our flamboyant Mardi Gras culture literally raises us to dress to impress—should prove fertile ground for inspired fashion design.
“We have that ball culture, and we’re also in the Deep South, so people really embrace color and different fabrics,” Chatelain says. “There’s a boldness here that’s fed by our sense of pageantry.”
MPAC takes place Thursday, January 11, 2024. For more information, visit artbr.org/mpac.
