[Abstract] In recent years, along with China’s continuous economic growth and constant upgrade of its consumer market, consumers’ demand for fashion information consumption has greatly increased. Under the pandemic, global fashion consumption, production and authority are undergoing tremendous changes. This poses both risks and opportunities. At present, global fashion assets are quietly reorganizing, presenting a great opportunity for China’s fashion industry to achieve overtaking on a curve. Since reform and opening-up, China’s fashion market has formed a complete manufacturing industrial chain with very strong production support. Meanwhile, as global tensions and conflicts intensify in recent years, increasingly mature "Made in China" brands have also gained growing popularity among Chinese consumers and established a stable market base. At this critical juncture, China's fashion industry should seize opportunities to consolidate and enhance fashion authority, boost development and communication of Chinese fashion, and elevate China's cultural soft power.

Fashion communication has the function of value-added premium and can enhance the intrinsic value of symbolic products. Fashion extravaganzas are specific means of fashion communication, which usually trigger subsequent media coverage, thus arousing social attention to generate benefits of attention economy. But Chinese fashion extravaganzas generally have low recognition and weak economic and social influence. As a globally prestigious fashion gala, the American Met Gala boasts tremendous communication power and recognition, extremely high capability in fashion value-added, and is of great research value. With long history, strong artistry, diverse communication channels, enthusiastic public opinion echo, Met Gala is the much-talked-about annual fashion "place of fame and gain" for fashion lovers. It well caters to market demand and intra-industry needs of the fashion industry, becoming a vane for fashion development. Every year, top fashion brands and industry professionals compete to participate, socializing with excellent resources while displaying their superior social and industrial status. With formidable social influence, Met Gala has raised huge operating funds for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while providing collection, display, research and education services for the fashion industry. Moreover, its spillover effects also brought abundant ticket revenue and brand economic benefits for the Costume Institute, boosting local fashion industry development.

Met Gala is a fashion exhibition service product. Wherein, information consumers are value transformation intermediaries, while the real service object and beneficiary is the fashion industry. Its produced information consumer product has superb visual experience and impact, highly suitable for new media communication based on attention economy. From the fashion communication perspective in the information dissemination process, Met Gala's operation mechanism follows the fashion brand value-added process. Firstly, brand is the premise of fashion communication and the basis for Met Gala to carry out gala value-adding process. Therefore, the branded Met Gala is actually a symbolic product, whose product making requires the material carrier of information, namely the basic organizational structure of fashion galas. Hence this research first analyzed the basic organizational composition of Met Gala, namely the various subjects and inter-subject relations in the symbolic production and consumption process. Secondly, constructing the significance and value of fashion galas needs to simultaneously meet consumers’ emotional needs and industrial development needs. From the fashion brand perspective, emotional value is the core of brand value. Therefore, enhancing consumers’ emotional needs will bring profitable returns on consumer purchases. Meanwhile, fashion galas themselves originate from industrial development needs, so they should even more focus on constructing commercial trust and other emotions around industrial needs. Thirdly, after completing the carrier and meaning construction, fashion galas enter the stage of meaning value-added to improve value transformation efficiency. Meaning value-added refers to improving the perceived awareness, recognition and associations of the gala among the audience. Therefore, fashion galas need to elevate their brand value from multiple dimensions of time, space, cognition and frequency.