Lifestyle

Inside the Most Politically Charged Met Gala in Years

Published

9 months ago

May 5, 2025

Inside the Most Politically Charged Met Gala in Years

Last 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 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, the 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 fund-raiser 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 Mr. 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 Ms. 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,” Mr. 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 Ms. Wintour and kept secret until the event, there have been some leaks and confirmations.

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

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

The irony, Ms. 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 Mr. 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 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 Ms. 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 D.E.I. 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.

Mr. Bolton and Ms. 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 Professor Miller but the 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,” Professor 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.

Ms. 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-D.E.I. 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 spokeswoman 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.”

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Lifestyle

‘Fireworks’ wins Caldecott, Newbery is awarded to ‘All the Blues in the Sky’

Published

5 hours ago

January 27, 2026

Press Room

‘Fireworks’ wins Caldecott, Newbery is awarded to ‘All the Blues in the Sky’

Fireworks, by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Cátia Chien has won the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children, and All the Blues in the Sky, written by Renée Watson has been awarded the Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature.

Clarion Books; Bloomsbury Children’s Books

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Clarion Books; Bloomsbury Children’s Books

The best books for children and young adults were awarded the country’s top honors by the American Library Association on Monday.

Illustrator Cátia Chien and author Matthew Burgess took home the Caldecott Medal for the book Fireworks. The Caldecott is given annually to the most distinguished American picture book for children. Fireworks follows two young siblings as they eagerly await the start of a July 4th fireworks show. Paired with Chien’s vibrant illustrations, Burgess’ poetic language enhances the sensory experience of fireworks.” When you write poems with kids, you see how immediately they get this,” Burgess told NPR in 2025 in a conversation about his book Words with Wings and Magic Things. “If you read a poem aloud to kids, they start to dance in their seats.”

The Newbery Medal, awarded for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature, went to Renée Watson for All the Blues in the Sky. This middle-grade novel, also told in verse, follows 13-year-old Sage, who struggles with grief following the death of her best friend. Watson is also the author of Piecing Me Together, which won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Award and was also a Newbery Medal honor book. “I hope that my books provide space for young people to explore, and say, “Yeah, I feel seen,” Watson told NPR in 2018. “That’s what I want young people to do — to talk to each other and to the adults in their lives.”

This year’s recipients of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards include Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes (author award) and The Library in the Woods, by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie (illustrator award). Arriel Vinson’s Under the Neon Lights received the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Award for New Talent.

Los Angeles based artist Kadir Nelson was honored with the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. His work has appeared in more than 30 children’s books.

This year’s Newbery Honor Books were The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli, by Karina Yan Glaser; A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez by María Dolores Águila and The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri.

Caldecott Honors books were Every Monday Mabel by Jashar Awan, Our Lake by Angie Kang, Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave by Drew Beckmeyer, and Sundust by Zeke Peña.

Edited by Jennifer Vanasco and Beth Novey.

Lifestyle

What if Black boys in L.A. were afforded the grace to dream?

Published

6 hours ago

January 27, 2026

Press Room

What if Black boys in L.A. were afforded the grace to dream?

In the soundtrack of his youth, Walter Thompson-Hernández and his friends liked to devise a game of escape. Extending their arms in a v-formation at their side, they would race down the street on weekend afternoons imagining the freedom of the airplanes soaring across the blue infinity of their Huntington Park neighborhood.

Thompson-Hernández never lost that sense of dreaming. This month, he made his feature-length debut at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival with “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” a film of audacious sight and attentive storytelling that unfolds from the perspective of its protagonist Lil Ant, a Watts-raised, 12-year-old obsessed with airplanes and Greek mythology. Where coming-of-age stories often confront the crush of innocence — the fracture and shock of stolen virtue — Thompson-Hernández instead renders one about preservation. A preservation, in part, held together by Lozita (Danielle Brooks), a mom and wife working to keep her family whole now that Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is home from prison.

The film isn’t trying to absorb or recklessly mirror the traumas of the Black family so much as make a case for its nuance. In “If I Go,” Thompson-Hernández scraps the three-act structure for something more novelistic, a risk that a lesser director might have fumbled but one he turns into a profound taxonomy on grace. It is a story that interrogates — with a searching and brutal tenderness — the how, why and who of our emotional being. Even as Lil Ant yearns to be closer to his father, what the film doesn’t do is beg you to empathize with the conditions that its characters war against; instead, it demands that you simply acknowledge their presence, their wounds and their dreaming.

Thompson-Hernández’s cinematic canvas recalls a Los Angeles rarely afforded witness on screen. You won’t find any wasted thinking about the tired pathologies of urban decay; the film takes pleasure in depicting Black Angelenos in the fullness of their complexity, celebrating the toil and wonder of how people come together and fall apart, of how love is broken and remade. “There’s already a lyricism that exists in each of our lives,” he tells me. “In how we speak, in how our bodies move through the world, and how we touch each other. I’m sensitive to that.”

Though today he primarily works in the medium of film, Thompson-Hernández has a kaleidoscopic approach to craft. A former journalist for the New York Times, he’s as comfortable writing about the legacy of Black cowboys in Southern California (his 2020 book, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland,” was a New York Times bestseller) as he is directing a Beats By Dre commercial for the Super Bowl or shooting a sports documentary for Netflix. In 2025, his Portuguese-language film “Kites” — a story about personal reclamation in favelas of Rio de Janeiro — won the Special Jury Mention for Viewpoints at the Tribeca Film Festival. What Thompson-Hernández’s art so easily dispels, no matter the genre it finds a home in, are all the knotty, misguided and trite representations of otherness in our contemporary world. He is a seer of the unseen.

(Vladimir Santos) (Kemal Cilengir)

Jason Parham: A major theme in the film wrestles with what it means to find your place at home when you return. Was that a personal story?

Walter Thompson-Hernández: So much happens to the figures in our lives who travel away from us and eventually come back home. Thematically, this movie is about flight and transportation — both the physical flights that one takes, but also the emotional and spiritual flights. Big Ant, the father [character], returns after doing a stint in prison, but what his son sees as a Grecian 10-year war. That’s been my relationship to so many of the men who I grew up around.

JP: How so?

WTH: They would be gone for a while and we wouldn’t know where they would be. Then they would just show up after two or three or four years. We’d ask questions. It would be, “So-and-so was locked up” or “So-and-so had to go away for a while but now he’s back.” Greek mythology became a North Star for understanding very complicated characters in my own life.

JP: Why was that sense of imagination important to explore?

WTH: The aperture from which I lived my life was very small. It was a very contained world that only existed around a few geographic locations and a few blocks. Eventually I was able to leave. But very few of us get to make it out. Which is a weird sentence — get to make it out — because so many people want to be here and come here all the time. But there are those of us that got the chance to travel and to essentially fly. The older I got, the more I realized how small my world was as a child, but also how expansive and imaginative it was. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” there’s a passage that I always think about. I’m paraphrasing, but he tells his son something to the extent of — James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, those are yours. And then he says Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Simone de Beauvoir — listing all these European artists and thinkers — those are also yours. I’m extending that care and grace to the boy in this movie. A lot of us, we don’t get to dream in that way as Black or brown boys in L.A.

On the set of "If I Go Will They Miss Me"

On the set of "If I Go Will They Miss Me." Thompson-Hernandez on the right.

JP: What did young Walter dream about?

WTH: Our home was right in between both LAX flight paths. The sound of these airplanes is something that I’ll never forget. My mom and aunts still live in that neighborhood. When I go back, I forget how strong the sound of the airplanes are, how abrasive and all-encompassing. As a child, I was drawn to the mystery of them — where they were coming from and where they were going. I would imagine who was in them. My friends and I, we made up games where we would race airplanes on our bikes or we’d sprint down the block extending our arms. They had this power over us. The movie is me making sense of that mystery and beauty while also understanding that I have asthma because of them.

JP: You’re referring to the health complications people suffer from in areas downwind of the flight paths.

WTH: Cancer rates and asthma are so prevalent among the people who I grew up around. There is an irony in airplanes. On one hand, we can dream about them and all the places they can take us, but the tangible effects are that they are harming us. Jet fuelers, all those things. As children, how do we wrestle with those complex ideas, while on the ground wrestling with complex ideas about adolescence, about our parents. To say growing up under the LAX flight path is a complicated experience, there’s so much truth in that. Taking the mythology of these airplanes and applying that to the mythology that we create about adults in our lives is something that I hope people really feel in this movie.

JP: There are a lot of smart technical choices in the film, from the sound to the set design. Who were your influences?

WTH: I could reference films like “Killer of Sheep” or “The Battle of Algiers” or “Gummo” or “He Got Game”; there’s a list of at least 50 movies. But there’s something about looking at a Jacob Lawrence painting that offers me the biggest inspiration in terms of the dexterity and freedom and elasticity of Black bodies in space. There’s something about painting as a medium for me that lives outside of the limits of photography and film. There aren’t a lot of barriers and boundaries to how painters experience the world. Whether it’s Jacob Lawrence or Henry Taylor or Winfred Rembert or Kerry James Marshall. I obviously study literature, photography and film, but painting is where I go for ideas around framing and composition.

(Vladimir Santos)

JP: The film plays with different interpretations of light. How would you describe your relationship to light?

WTH: I am so drawn to natural lighting. I’m drawn to patient frames. Usually the frame is a middle shot or a wide shot. And there’s inserts and close-ups sometimes, but I feel very confident in the way that we stage and we block the scene. I feel confident that the information is gonna exist on screen. When I was a journalist at the New York Times, I didn’t just write everything, I also photographed everything I worked on. In terms of creating a visual language, I feel very, very comfortable framing and creating compositions in film. A lot of times you watch movies that feel over-lit. There’s too much information that we are able to gather. Working with our cinematographer, Michael Fernandez, we trust the audience so much, almost too much. If something feels a bit darker, if something is not lit in a way that feels a little too highly produced, I trust that someone will still be able to recognize and find the truth and honesty in every frame.

JP: So much so that L.A. begins to feel like its own character. Was there a certain story — one that hasn’t been told about the city — that you wanted to illuminate?

WTH: So many of us grew up watching ’90s L.A. movies: “South Central,” “Menace II Society,” “Friday.” All the Chicano gangster movies, “Blood In Blood Out.” There was also “Heat.” There’s so many movies about Los Angeles in the ’90s that really got L.A. in a way that most modern day movies about Los Angeles don’t. Something happened along the way where people who weren’t from L.A. started to make movies about Los Angeles. It felt a bit tropey often. It created a checklist. “Oh, it needs a lowrider. It needs a palm tree. It needs perfect orange, cotton candy lighting.” It feels kinda corny, if I’m being honest. For a lot of us, I don’t have to tell you that this movie is set in L.A. You feel it, you hear it.

JP: Yes, you hear it. I appreciated how the sonic texture — whether it was a Nate Dogg track or radio spots from Power 106 — helped ground the viewer not only in what they were witnessing, but why.

WTH: Sonically, I’m having a conversation in this movie about how this once-primarily Black community set in Nickerson Gardens in Watts was once over 90% Black, today is over 80% Latino. Which is a real conversation about change, about how Black people have been getting pushed out for generations, but also a complex story about immigration. It’s not always violence, there’s also peace and all this other stuff. The way I explore that is through sound and music. If you notice, this family, the Harris family, they hear a lot of Spanish-language music coming from a neighbor’s home, coming from the outside. There’s a version of that that feels more soapboxy, where I’m telling somebody in dialogue or in the scene that this community was once Black and it’s almost no longer Black. For me, it just felt more interesting to hear that. We’re hearing a Mexican ice cream truck and all these other things. That’s also telling us that this family is experiencing demographic change.

JP: If we can, I want to talk about the state of Hollywood —

WTH: It was so hard to get this movie made, man. It was a challenge. If I’m being incredibly honest with you, I think there was a run beginning in 2020 or so, where a lot of people felt the urge and maybe pressure to support movies made by women and people of color.

JP: Without question.

WTH: And people were supported in ways that were incredible. But for one reason or another, some of those movies didn’t do too well. They didn’t make the money back, which we can sit here and debate about why that happened. I tried to make this movie at the tail end of that run of support. Everyone in Hollywood loved the script. Everyone in Hollywood loved me. Everyone said, “Hey man, we love this. And we love you so much. But we supported something similar a year or two ago and we’re not doing that anymore.” I heard that so much, and from people that would surprise you. Then, in 2023, I got involved in the Sundance Catalyst program. The program invites financiers to finance eight independent movies. [“If I Go”] really took a lot of support and a lot of effort from people who believed in me and believed in the script. It was an interesting time to make an independent movie about a Black family from Los Angeles.

JP: Does the reality of industry have any bearing on the art you want to create versus the art it’s ready for?

WTH: The art that I want to make looks at humans making sense of their lives and the world in a way that maybe we haven’t seen before. There’s a lot of lyricism. There’s all sorts of things. I don’t know if I’m necessarily thinking about the movie industry when I make the art that I make. People don’t know what they want until they see it, until they feel it. I always say this: Sometimes you make something that exists in time and sometimes you make things that are of time. When people are making things that are of time, it’s responding to the zeitgeist or weird ideas around marketing and what’s popular.

JP: What’s trending on TikTok.

WTH: Exactly. It feels so reactionary. That’s of time. I like to think about making things that are in time. In time, for me, is making art that is in conversation with this beautiful legacy of artistry and of filmmaking. It’s making things without thinking about the moment. It’s thinking about truth in character, truth in dialogue, truth in scene, truth in composition, truth in sound. That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about honesty. When it comes to my art, I always want to be in time.

Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a documentary producer. He is a frequent contributor to Image.

Lifestyle

Pretty hurts (and then some) in Ryan Murphy’s body-horror ‘The Beauty’ : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Published

17 hours ago

January 27, 2026

Press Room

Pretty hurts (and then some) in Ryan Murphy’s body-horror ‘The Beauty’ : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Ashton Kutcher as The Corporation in The Beauty.

Eric Liebowitz/FX

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Eric Liebowitz/FX

The Beauty stars familiar faces from the Ryan Murphy universe, including Evan Peters, as well as new collaborators like Ashton Kutcher. In the show, a genetic biotech serum has been engineered to transform people into ridiculously good-looking supermodels. But there’s at least one problem: Eventually, those supermodels are dying suddenly, horrifically and spectacularly. Is it astute commentary, crass exploitation, or maybe a bit of both? Well, it’s definitely a Ryan Murphy production, through and through.

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