New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which draws millions of visitors every year, is closed only four days out of 365: Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and the first Monday in May.
That last, though not yet an internationally recognised holiday, is nevertheless a holiday recognised internationally: It is the annual Met Gala, the most celebrated benefit in global fashion and New York society, toasting the opening of the spring exhibition of the museum’s Costume Institute. It is of a magnitude that effectively shuts down the city’s social thrum for the evening; it also shuts down the Met.
For more than a decade, the gala has been orchestrated by Vogue and its indomitable editor, Anna Wintour, after whom, in tribute, the Costume Institute named its renovated galleries in 2014.
Wintour and her staff decide who may come and who may not, who sits where and with whom, and the million other decisions that have made the gala a party for which guests pay millions. About these decisions, they remain vigilantly mum.
But last year, they allowed in a filmmaker, Andrew Rossi, to document the creation of both the spring exhibition, ‘China: Through the Looking Glass,’ and the accompanying party.
The result, The First Monday in May, is not exactly an expose, but it is as close as anyone has yet come. Footage of the production budget for Rihanna’s appearance being negotiated were bleeped (though viewers learned she was asking more than any other performer had before, including Kanye West), and Rossi was party to some things he couldn’t show. Spreadsheets of budget numbers were “like the Snowden documents”, he said after the film.
But for those curious about how Harvey Weinstein may end up (or not) sitting by a supermodel or a starlet, the curtain is drawn, revealing the chilly wizards behind it. (“Josh Hartnett? What’s he done lately? Nothing,” Sylvana Ward Durrett, Vogue’s director of special projects and a producer of the film, who is the magazine’s day-to-day liaison on the gala, is captured saying.)
The First Monday in May received its world premiere on Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Wintour, Metropolitan Museum curators and Met Gala attendees past walked the red carpet.
Some seemed more at ease with the fame film brings than others. Andrew Bolton, the perennially Thom Browne-clad curator in charge of the Costume Institute (and curator of ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’), is effectively the hero of the film, realising his vision for the show while navigating the hesitations of fellow curators, collaborators and critics.
On to Hollywood after this?
“I doubt it,” Bolton said. “It was totally out of my comfort zone.”
“I was never interested in making a movie about a party or the mechanics of an event,” said Rossi, who’s previous films include Page One, a documentary about The New York Times. “I was interested in other ideas, like the marriage of art and commerce and unpacking the mythology around Anna Wintour.”
Wintour’s fabled steeliness is a major feature of the film (she is juxtaposed, as a paradigm of “dragon lady” grit, with Anna May Wong, the Chinese-American film star, in a way that both questions and reinforces that stereotype). But at the premiere, she was all warmth and support.
“There’s a lot of attention paid to the opening night,” she said dryly, “but what Andrew [Rossi] was trying to achieve with the documentary was Andrew Bolton’s creative process.”
But both she and Bolton have to create enormous productions, the scope of which dwarfs those that came before. Chloe Grace Moretz, who will attend her third Met Gala this year, came to the premiere after the third of her five fittings for her couture dress (by Coach, a brand she represents).
Lauren Hutton, an occasional gala attendee since the 1970s, when Diana Vreeland ran the Costume Institute, said there was no comparison between the event under Vreeland and the Wintour-produced mega-parties.
“Are you kidding?” Hutton said. Among those she attended, “The first four or five were in the basement. Now it’s the biggest night in New York, isn’t it?”
