The tricky politics of this year's Met Gala

New York: In October, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute announced its next fashion show, "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style," the political landscape looked very different.

Kamala Harris, the first female vice president and the first Black woman ever to top a major-party ticket, was in the final weeks of her campaign for the White House.

The show, the culmination of five years of work by Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator in charge, to diversify the department's holdings and shows in the wake of the racial reckoning brought about by George Floyd's murder, seemed long overdue.

On Monday, however, when it finally opens to the starry guests at its signature gala, the splashiest party of the year, it will do so in a very different world. One in which the federal government has functionally declared war on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as programming related to race -- especially in cultural institutions.

In February, President Donald Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center, promising to make its programming less "woke." Then, in late March, he signed an executive order targeting what the administration described as "improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology" at the Smithsonian museums and threatened to withhold funds for exhibits that "divide Americans by race."

Against that backdrop, the Met's show, one devoted for the first time entirely to designers of color, which focuses on the way Black men have used fashion as a tool of self-actualization, revolution and subversion throughout American history and the Black diaspora, has taken on an entirely different relevance.

Suddenly the Met, one of the world's wealthiest and most established museums, has begun to look like the resistance. And the gala, which in recent years has been criticized as a tone-deaf display of privilege and fashion absurdity, is being seen as what Brandice Daniel, founder of Harlem's Fashion Row, a platform created to support designers of color, called a display of "allyship."

Especially because Anna Wintour, the Met Gala's mastermind, a powerful Democratic fundraiser and the chief content officer of Condé Nast, said on "The Late Late Show" in 2017 that the one person she would never invite back to the fete was Trump.

The collision of cultural and current events means the Met is now sitting at the red-hot "center of where fashion meets the political economy," said Tanisha C. Ford, a history professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

"This feels way bigger than just fashion," said Louis Pisano, a cultural critic and the writer of the newsletter Discoursted. "Putting Black style front and center sends a real message."

"I didn't think I would see it in my lifetime," said Sandrine Charles, a publicist and co-founder of the Black in Fashion Council.

That has left the companies sponsoring the show and the gala, including Instagram and Louis Vuitton -- both of which are owned by corporations actively courting the Trump administration -- walking a precarious tightrope. It has raised the stakes around what has become known as "the party of the year." And it has turned a pop culture event into a potential political statement.

So Who's Going?

This year, more Black designers are expected to be worn on the opening party's red carpet, more Black stylists are dressing celebrities, and more Black celebrities are expected to attend than ever in the gala's 77-year history. Along with Wintour, the gala's co-chairs are ASAP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton, Colman Domingo and Pharrell Williams; the honorary chair is LeBron James.

"It's important that we don't sit this one out," Pisano said. "Not when Black fashion is finally being centered in an institution that has historically excluded it." He was talking about both the show and the gala. "I'm already bracing for the conservative backlash once they pay attention to it, and that's why it's especially important that people show up," he continued.

Though few specifics are known about the guest list, which is controlled by Wintour and kept secret until the event, there have been some leaks and confirmations.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chair of Meta, who has been wooing the president, is not attending the gala this year. Adam Mosseri, however, CEO of Instagram, which is owned by Meta, will be there, as he has in the past.

Bernard Arnault, the chair of LVMH, who was at the Trump inauguration, will sit the event out, as he has since 1996, but Pietro Beccari, CEO of Louis Vuitton, an LVMH brand, is attending. Jeff Bezos and his fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, who attended last year, are not expected to be there this year, nor is Trump's right-hand man, Elon Musk, who attended three times before, most recently in 2022. Michael Bloomberg, who gave $50 million to support Harris in the last election, will be attending -- and rumor has it Harris, currently mulling her political future, might as well.

The irony, Wintour said, is that "the show was never about politics, not in conception, not now." Rather, she added, it was about "self-determination, beauty, creativity and holding up a lens to history."

At the same time, she acknowledged, "the Met recognizing and taking seriously the contributions of Black designers and the Black community in fashion has a heightened meaning in 2025."

Always Fraught for Different Reasons

Back in 2021, when Bolton first started thinking about the exhibition, which is based on a 2009 academic text called "Slaves to Fashion" by Monica L. Miller, a Barnard College professor whom he also enlisted as co-curator of the show, there were other concerns about how it might be received. Specifically, whether the Costume Institute -- a department that has never had a Black curator and part of a museum with its own history of racism -- would botch an exhibition about the sartorial reclamation of the Black male body and the use of fashion as a tool of liberation.

Adding further complications was the fact that Wintour, the department's greatest champion (it was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center in 2014), had in the past faced her own allegations of creating a racially insensitive workplace at Vogue. Not to mention that, despite the many DEI initiatives after 2020, the fashion world has seemingly failed to make good on those promises; of the more than 15 appointments at the top of major brands this year, not a single one was a designer of color.

Bolton and Wintour were "self-aware enough to know that they could not pull this off without the deep involvement and advice of the community involved," said Gabriela Karefa-Johnson, a stylist and Vogue's former global contributing editor at large (she left in 2023).

That meant bringing in not just Miller but modern dandy Iké Udé as a consultant. It meant working with a who's who of prominent Black creatives: Torkwase Dyson on the show space, Tanda Francis on the mannequins, Tyler Mitchell on the catalog and Kwame Onwuachi on the menu. It meant having the first "host committee" since 2019, and holding special advance panel discussions at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Billie Holiday Theater in Bed-Stuy.

There were also some concerns about whether "Hollywood would understand the assignment," Ford said, referring to worries about how certain guests might dress for the gala. "Would there be people who perhaps misrepresented Black culture and Black dress?" she went on.

Karefa-Johnson put it more dryly. "I just really don't want to see any floor-length durags or pimp canes," she said. (Still, she called the fact the show is happening in the current climate "poetic.") Jeffrey Banks, a designer whose work is included in the exhibition, called it "revolutionary."

"I have immense respect for the fact they've decided to have this conversation and stand strong in the face of that risk," Téla D'Amore of Who Decides War, a brand also featured in the exhibition, said of the Met.

Still, unlike the Smithsonian, the Met's dependence on government funds is negligible. As a private institution, the Met is not subject to the government's anti-DEI policies. The museum's diversity statement is still posted on its website for all to see. (A 13-point "antiracism and diversity plan" unveiled in 2020 was incorporated into the museum's strategic plan in 2022, according to a spokesperson and is no longer available.)

Its most significant relationship with the government may be through the federal Art and Artifacts Indemnity Program, an initiative administered by the National Endowment for the Arts that insures art that travels to or from American museums, providing peace of mind for lenders that their masterpieces are protected by the government and defraying institutional costs. The Met has its own insurance, but it applies for federal indemnity for its largest, most high-value shows, giving the government some leverage.

Which is why many involved with "Superfine" are focused not just on the gala evening, with all its star-studded glamour, or the exhibition's reception, but on what happens next.

"Does it swing all the way back next year?" asked Maxwell Osborne, the designer of anOnlyChild. "Like, you know, we had Obama for two terms, and then we go all the way back."