doesn't want anyone to know what she's planning or what she's up to until the minute they walk down that red carpet and through the door.' The detail of the flowers, the detail of the ushers, how they're dressed, everything has been vetted for months and weeks and months and weeks.'Īnd she prefers to keep the details close to her iconic Chanel dress, with Vogue contributing editor Plum Sykes telling The New York Post, 'It's very secretive. ' Making this list helps her to think about the event 'from start to finish-and to make sure that we're not missing anything.'Īs for how involved Wintour is with the details, the late Vogue contributing editor Andre Leon Talley said in The First Monday in May, 'Anna is meticulously vetting every single thing, from the napkins to the forks to the lighting.

'Then you everything that's involved surrounding. The first bullet point on her list? The tent.

'We have sort of a running to-do list that just gets longer and longer as we get closer-and we literally go through every day, even if it's redundant.' 'I'm a big fan of a one-sheet,' Vogue's then-director of special projects Ward Durrett explained of her process. (FYI, about 100 people work on the event year-round, including 10 full-time Vogue employees.) There's no rest for the fashionable as plans for the event usually start on the Tuesday immediately after the first Monday in May. Under her direction, the arduous prep that goes into throwing the Met Gala has become mythical, with individual ticket prices sky-rocketing to $30,000-just wait until you hear how much a table costs-and hundreds of staffers working year-round to make sure the menu, seating chart and the exhibit itself are all picture-perfect.even if celebs aren't allowed to snap photographs of anything once they step off the red carpet.

But the Met Gala, which was first held in 1948 and serves as a fundraiser for the museum's costume institute, did not become the sartorial sensation that its known for today until Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintourtook over as the gala's chair in 1995. The annual affair is so exclusive that it's just one of four days that New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art closes-the others being Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. That's right, the 2023 Met Gala is here, so you know what that means: It's time to break out your fanciest sweatpants and prepare to scratch your head over how your favorite celebrity's outfit relates to this year's theme, which is celebrating the work of Karl Lagerfeld, the former creative director of Chanel who passed away in 2019 from complications of pancreatic cancer. Cue the Justin Timberlake memes because it's gonna be May and the Super Bowl of fashion is upon us.

Penelope ward just one year