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.”