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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/briefing/met-gala-fashion.html
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Early May means the world’s biggest celebrities are wearing outrageous clothes. It’s why we love covering the Met Gala, which raises money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume wing.
The gala officially opens the Costume Institute’s exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” examining 300 years of Black fashion and the history of Black dandyism. Attended by the rich and famous and hosted, as always, by Anna Wintour, this year’s gala raised the most money ever in its history — $31 million.
Yet the party and the exhibition about Black style have a different feel than its planners may have intended. The political landscape looked very different when the Met announced the show in October, The Times’s chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, explained. Back then, Kamala Harris, the first Black woman ever to top a major-party ticket, was in the final weeks of her campaign for the White House. Now, the federal government has targeted all things involving diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as programming related to race — especially in cultural institutions.
The show has other political baggage, too. The Costume Institute has never had a Black curator, and the Met has its own history of racism. (This exhibition is the brain child of Andrew Bolton, the institute’s chief curator. It’s based on a 2009 academic text called “Slaves to Fashion” by Monica L. Miller, a Barnard professor who helped put the show together.) Despite many D.E.I. initiatives after 2020, the fashion world failed to make good on its promises; of the more than 15 recent appointments at the top of major brands, not a single one was Black.
But if there were concerns last night, you wouldn’t have known as Wintour’s co-chairs, Pharrell Williams, ASAP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton and Colman Domingo, greeted guests like Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Sha’Carri Richardson, Chappell Roan, Janelle Monáe and Kim Kardashian.
Harris skipped the red carpet but posed for photos before the event in her hotel room. She wore an asymmetric black silk gown with a choker neckline and one flowing white sleeve, designed by IB Kamara of Off-White.
