The Costume Institute just announced their Spring 2010 exhibition and the hosts for the Gala Benefit (to be held on May 3.) This year Anna will be sharing the duties with Oprah and The Gap’s Patrick Robinson.

Oprah and Anna together—that’s like some sort of world domination thing going on, right? Let’s just hope they can play nice in the planning process as these are two women who don’t often have to share.

This year’s exhibit sounds super interesting: American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity. It will shine the spotlight on different archetypes of American femininity through dress and “reveal how the American woman intitiated style revolutions that mirrored her social, political, and sexual emancipation.”

The big day is finally here and since we have a previous evening commitment, Gossip Girl, we spent the morning with Marc and Anna and Hamish and Harold and even a model or two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibit itself is spectacular. It opens with life size elephant cut outs and a mannequin wearing Dovima’s Avedon Dior. A hallway of Irving Penns pays tributes to the originals - Suzy Parker, Lisa Fonssagrives, Dorian Leigh and co. There are New Look coats and dresses, Charles James and a Madame Gres. You turn the corner to David Baileys, iconic images of Twiggy and Veruschka wielding her shotgun. Music blares, “Talking ‘bout my generation,” and the mannequins wear Cardins, Paco Rabbanne link dresses and a YSL Mondrian. Then it’s onto Lauren Hutton, Rene Russo, Jerry Hall and unreal Helmut Newton photographs before turning the corner to Versace clad models carrying, seriously, broken champagne bottles. Lastly, the supermodels and the 90s in a graffitied room stocked with Marc Jacobs’ Perry Ellis, Ellen Von Unwerth photography and mind-boggling pictures of Kate.

It’s this room, according to the Costume Institute’s Director Harold Koda, that Anna didn’t feel was “quite grunge enough” late Friday night. And so Oscar winning set director, John Meyer, stayed up Friday and into Saturday, tagging the walls with “Daria,” “Twiggy,” “Kate,” etc in army green, silver and black spray paint - it’s the best part of the whole thing.

Marc said he’s, “honored, flattered, thrilled, grateful to have anything to do with this institution,” and called his involvement, twenty years after his first Met, “a dream come true.” And Koda said he was a pleasure to work with - his only demand that “the exhibit be lively.”

We could gush some more, but basically, the exhibition lives up to the standard set by 06’s Anglomania. So go.

The Costume Institute at the Met is finally getting its own audio guide.

We never understood why one of the most popular, (at least in recent years), galleries lacked an informational tour to go with it. The clothes are fun to see, but left without any context other than the obligatory opening paragraph, one’s forced to imagine the stories behind them and the historical context in which they fit.

So, thanks to Harold Koda, the curator responsible for most of the institute’s recent success, visitors will get ten times more out of their Costume Institute experience.

And of course, when we’re talking about clothes that range from pre-Poiret to Paquin to Prada one can’t have just any narrator. Sarah Jessica Parker’s already recorded Costume: The Art of Dress which will cover most of the museum’s clothing and other pertinent works of art.

It’ll be fun to hear Carrie’s voice, we just hope an historian wrote the script.

Some fun news, thanks to WWD, especially if you’re looking for something to click on for a few hours today:

The Costume Institute’s digitized most of its incredibly extensive archive, complete with images and corresponding information, onto their site, which now includes roughly 31,000 pieces of historical clothing.

It’s not very browse-friendly (you can see the front page takes you to many shoe buckles…) but we suggest typing in the names of designers’ work you may not be as familiar with for full effect.

Our first choice was Charles Frederick Worth, which brought us to these 1887 gowns (strictly for balls, you know) - the best part? You can actually zoom in on sections of enlarged images, kind of like shopping on Anthropologie, except smarter.

Have fun.

Confession:

We are smitten with the Forever 21 dress at right, inspired by two things at once:

The first, of course, is the famous Composition series by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

The second is a YSL sheath dress from 1965, currently housed in the Met Museum’s archives.

“But it’s a copy!” you say, and we’re like, yeah, we know, but it’s a copy 43 years in the making, or 80-something years, since Mondrian began painting his most famous series in 1922. (We still don’t plan on actually purchasing it.)

Is it wrong to hope next, Forever 21 makes a sheath with giant soup cans all over it?

(Yes, yes, we know, very wrong…)

We’d bet money or even shoes on the fact that someone at the Costume Ball will arrive wearing Prada, and someone will arrive wearing Lanvin.

The curious thing is, Miuccia Prada and Alber Elbaz may not arrive at all.

We hear from an inside source that, as of today, neither the Prada head nor the Lanvin creative director have made plans to attend the Costume Ball, a curious notion considering both are huge Vogue advertisers and both are also pretty damn cool.

Even more interesting is that Prada most definitely has a table at the ball - they’ve even invited Tilda Swinton, Oscar winning awesomeness, to sit there.

Why are the designers avoiding the “Biggest Party of the Year”?

And is there any way that we could just dress up as them and go instead? Because duh, we’d totally wear glasses and a bow tie or a giant feather hoop skirt, just for the chance to shake George Clooney’s hand and brush up against an Olsen!

Months after the Costume Institute announces it’s big ball theme - Comic Book Chic - and already we’re seeing it reverberate in the mass market.

To the left is an upcoming print from Puma; to the right is a hoodie from Topshop. They’re almost identical, and they’re not the only Pop prints you’ll see this Spring and Summer.

This is on top of the runway masks at Marc, Luella, and Alexander McQueen, and past the editorials in Bazaar and V that literally turn comic books into fashion spreads.

And if Vogue isn’t sponsoring a Lichtenstein exhibit in the next year, then our Magic 8 Ball is totally, totally busted.