The word floriography has a poetic, succinctly beautiful definition: “the language of flowers.”
Take, for example, the superstition of the Bleeding Heart: If you crush one of its blooms and the juice is red, your love is reciprocated. If the juice is white…well, it may be time to move on. There’s the mythology of ferns: Druids believed that if you found the seeds of this plant, you’d be granted the power of invisibility. (Even Shakespeare wrote about this.) And there’s the social signaling of jasmine: In Tunisia, men tuck a fragrant bouquet of them behind one ear or the other to indicate their relationship status.
With the 2024 Met Gala’s Garden of Time dress code, there were hundreds of flowers—and attendant interpretations—to consider, so we reached out to the floriography expert Karen Azoulay for help. She’s the author of Flowers and Their Meanings and the creator behind the popular Instagram account @flowersmeanings. Azoulay wields a deep knowledge of botanical symbolism, and here we analyze the possible meanings and subtexts embedded in last night’s garden, as it were. (Whether the designers themselves were aware of their meanings is a separate question.)
My night began with reporting red carpetside for CNN. Out there, I noticed Jack Harlow’s lily-of-the-valley brooch from Dior (as it happened, I had bought exactly the same pin to wear for the evening). Azoulay told me that many believe the lily-of-the-valley symbolizes a “return of happiness,” which feels like a good place to begin this examination.
