Read an Excerpt from ANNA: The Biography

All about the Met Gala.

Thank you for subscribing to Back Row! The publication of my second book ANNA: The Biography is one week away. This biography of Anna Wintour is the product of interviews with more than 250 people, including some of fashion’s biggest names and some of her closest friends and colleagues. You can support both the book and this newsletter, which is free to read, by preordering the book here.

I’m thrilled to share the first excerpt, just published in Time magazine — all about the Met Gala. If you are new here, please subscribe to Back Row! I’ll be sharing more stories from the book and about writing it in this newsletter in the coming weeks.

On the evening of May 2, Anna Wintour will take her place at the top of the carpeted steps leading into New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wintour, now Condé Nast’s global chief content officer as well as the global editorial director of Vogue, has been hosting the Met Gala for nearly 30 years. She is always happy on this night, a year in the making—but this is still work. And that means every detail must be perfect.

Former Met Gala planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff—also a former adviser to Melania Trump—describes Wintour as “militant” during the party each year. “Where is everybody? It’s time,” Wintour says to her team. “Where are they? Can you tell me where they are?” The Vogue staff knows. Every guest has a prearranged arrival time, and Wintour’s people know what cars they’ll arrive in, if they’ve left the house, what they’ll be wearing, and if they’ve broken a zipper along the way that needs to be fixed.

Planning the gala typically begins in the early fall with 7 a.m. meetings at the Met every four to six weeks. In past years, the museum’s team has tried to keep the costs and footprint down, though Vogue has pushed the party to become the sort of thing that demands a 4,000-lb. floral arrangement. As with her assistants, Wintour has had a habit of not learning the names of some at the Met that she has worked with—year after year—to plan the party, a former staff member recalls. Sometimes she addresses them as “you” and points; other times she calls them variations on their names. Her directives have often been so absurd the Met team just laughs them off. According to two people familiar with her remarks, at one point Wintour gave them the impression that she found the Temple of Dendur ugly and said she wanted to board it up, but ultimately compromised and simply had Katy Perry’s stage erected in front of it. (“Anna has been in the public eye for 30 years, speaks regularly about her life and work, and yet she has often found herself in a position in which others claim to be telling her story,” a spokesperson for Vogue wrote when asked to comment on this piece. “Anna: The Biography was written without Anna’s participation.”) 

At dinner, Wintour notices every detail. When Kim Kardashian wore a custom latex Thierry Mugler dress that redefined tight to the camp-themed party in 2019, Wintour kept saying to Lisa Love, a personal friend and former longtime West Coast director of Vogue, “Can you please tell her to sit down?” Love had to explain that, actually, Kardashian physically could not sit.

“The only thing about the Met that I wish hadn’t happened is that it’s turned into a costume party,” designer Tom Ford says. “That used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn’t have to look like the 18th century, you didn’t have to dress like a hamburger, you didn’t have to arrive in a van where you were standing up because you couldn’t sit down because you wore a chandelier.” (The planners often have to provide backless chairs for guests wearing gowns that won’t fit into regular seats.) 

But Wintour loves the over-the-top looks. “It’s that English part of her. She loves a dress-up party,” Love says.

A night of excess and exhibition, the Met Gala is where Wintour flaunts her dominance over an industry that’s predicated on the understanding that there is an “in” and an “out.” In Wintour’s world, people occupy those distinct buckets. Some are always “out”—low-performing assistants, the Met’s event planners who tell her she can’t hang a dropped ceiling over a priceless statue, the Hilton sisters. Some, whose success, power, creativity, and beauty are undeniable, are therefore always “in” (Ford, Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Michelle Obama). Some begin as “in” and get moved to “out” (the late André Leon Talley). Others begin as “out” and become “in” (Kardashian). 

Wintour’s longevity as a fashion mega-influencer in a business that is fickle by design is unmatched, and the Met Gala is the ultimate manifestation of her power. But her selection of who’s in and who’s out—who gets her endorsement in the industry, and therefore who gets fast-tracked to success—extends far beyond the guest list. 

“As much as she loves a person who has talent,” Talley said before his death, “if she does not love you, then you’re in trouble.” 

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The Met Gala started as a fundraiser for the Costume Institute in 1948. Called the party of the year, it was a midnight supper for New York society. Wintour began planning it in 1995, a period when the museum wanted to reignite buzz around the Costume Institute, and turned it into an event that had representatives for celebrities calling and asking for invitations. Many were repeatedly denied. The celebrity guest list, carefully curated over the years by Wintour, led the Met Gala to be dubbed the “Oscars of the East Coast,” but that moniker no longer fits: in terms of the red carpet, the Met Gala now surpasses the cultural significance of the Oscars.

The event has not been without controversies, which have only increased buzz around the annual tradition. In 2018, Scarlett Johansson walked the “Heavenly Bodies” carpet in one of the more demure evening gowns of the night, by Marchesa, but still caused quite a spectacle. It was the first major red-carpet appearance for the label since designer Georgina Chapman’s husband, Harvey Weinstein, had been brought down in a defining story of the decade.

On Oct. 5, 2017, the New York Times had published Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s report about Weinstein’s long history of paying off sexual harassment and assault accusers. It was followed five days later by an explosive story in the New Yorker by Ronan Farrow, which contained additional damaging accounts of sexual assault and harassment by Weinstein. 

Weinstein had long been a known bully, but someone working closely with Wintour at the time said there was no indication that she knew about the allegations detailed in the Times and the New Yorker. Nonetheless, her loyalty to certain people ran deep, and she and Weinstein seemed to have a relationship that went beyond a typical industry friendship. Weinstein had feverishly courted her favor since the mid-’90s, desperate for both her approval and for Vogue to cover his films. Their decades-long relationship was why Wintour repeatedly made the allowance—afforded to no one else—for him to split the cost of a table at the Met Gala with Tamara Mellon, the Jimmy Choo co-founder. And why he was among a small group of guests Wintour made sure were discreetly pulled out of the line queued up before the red carpet so they didn’t have to wait. It also seemed to explain why Wintour had to be talked out of having lunch with Weinstein at his invitation after the Times story broke (to avoid the possibility of being photographed together). And presumably why it took a full eight days after the Times story came out for her statement denouncing his behavior to appear in the paper…

Read the rest over at Time.com.

And get the book here.