Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll get a glimpse of what to expect at what is perhaps the premier event on the city’s social calendar. And we’ll meet the new chief executive of the New York Climate Exchange.
New York City’s biggest fashion event — the Met Gala, officially the benefit for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — will play out tonight. The evening’s honorary chair and main sponsor is Amazon’s founder, the billionaire Jeff Bezos. And the spectacle comes a couple of days after the opening of “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” in which Meryl Streep again plays a fictional alter ego of Anna Wintour, the longtime chair of the gala (and the global editorial director of Vogue magazine).
I asked Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times’s fashion director and chief fashion critic, to talk about the gala’s continuing importance — and relevance.
Has the Met Gala had its moment?
People have been asking that question for almost as long as there has been a Met Gala. And the fact is, it’s still around, and people are still talking about it.
The cultural historian Debora Silverman wrote a book in 1986 that looked in part at the transformation of the gala and the Costume Institute when Diana Vreeland was involved. Many of the same criticisms currently lobbed at Anna Wintour and the Bezoses about buying your way into cultural legitimacy were being voiced then, and that was 40 years ago. The gripes are not a new story.
But Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not going.
It wasn’t as if mayors went every year. Bill de Blasio went once in eight years, after the Covid lockdowns, in part to demonstrate that the city was open again. Eric Adams went once. Michael Bloomberg went more than that, but not every year.
The difference in the past is that when mayors didn’t go, they didn’t make an announcement about it.
So going or not going is mostly about optics?
Yes: Whatever the reason, what people see is the presence. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discovered in 2021, when she attended wearing a dress that said “Tax the Rich,” and all everyone talked about was whether she should have been there at all, not what point her dress was trying to make.
There were posters urging a boycott because of Bezos’ involvement. Will that kind of public pushback make a difference?
A lot of the posters came down pretty quickly, though the reporting about the posters lives on.
I think Bezos is inured to criticism at this point. I think Anna Wintour probably is, too. She feels that this is very important for the museum and very important for the Costume Institute and that the Costume Institute is important for preserving the history of fashion as a decorative art form, and that outweighs the whining.
But Bezos has become the embodiment of a certain kind of egregious wealth in America, just as the Met Gala has become the embodiment of a certain kind of egregious elevation of wealth and celebrity, and that makes them useful targets for a lot of current rage and unrest. It can’t be comfortable for the museum.
But there’s a purpose behind raising the money, isn’t there?
Both Anna Wintour, who has been chair of the party since 1999, and Andrew Bolton, who became the curator in charge of the Costume Institute in 2016, have made it their goal to ensure the future of the Costume Institute.
She has done that by raising the money for the new Conde M. Nast Galleries, which open this week and are where the gift shop used to be in the main hall. So the Costume Institute is going from the basement, where it has always been, to the first thing you see when you enter the museum. It’s a huge deal.
As is the money from the gala.
The galas have brought in so much money that the Costume Institute has set some aside. The gala made $31 million last year. It doesn’t cost $31 million a year to run the Costume Institute at the Met, which is where the money goes — it costs around $5 million. So in the last 10 years they have saved about $100 million, which they are using to create a sort of endowment. In two to four years, it will be big enough that the Costume Institute will be able to use the interest to fund its operations.
That will take some of the pressure to raise money off the party — which, in turn, might allow it to move away from being the kind of over-the-top celebration of oligarchy, power and fame that it has become in the minds of its critics.
But people love to read about that, don’t we?
Even people who criticize the Met Gala end up looking at the pictures. If people who criticize the Met Gala want it to end, they should just stop talking about it.
Weather
Sunny skies are expected as temperatures rise back into the 70s. Tonight will be mostly clear, with a low around 58.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“You cannot reverse the damage. And there was so much damage.” — Lisa Cheng Smith, who runs a Taiwanese general store in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on President Trump’s tariffs. The store has “barely squeaked by” despite strong sales, she said.
The latest New York news
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A clash between the have and have-not schools: A battle between a coveted but overcrowded elementary school and a beloved middle school on the Upper West Side echoes struggles unfolding in school systems across the nation where enrollments are declining.
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A makeover for Grand Army Plaza: Planned changes could help untangle traffic for cyclists, pedestrians and drivers on a loop so dangerous it once had an unofficial “Death-O-Meter.”
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An uncertain fate for historic Brooklyn buildings: The Paul Robeson Theater in Fort Greene and the Stuyvesant Mansion in Stuyvesant Heights are facing a court-ordered sale. They were once owned by Dr. Josephine English, the first Black female obstetrician to open a private practice in New York.
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Protesting an ICE detention: A man was dragged out of a Brooklyn hospital by ICE agents as a crowd of protesters clashed with police officers on the street, cellphone footage shows.
The Climate Exchange names a new leader
On the way to see the Empire State Building for the very first time, M. Sanjayan and his parents stopped at a fast-food restaurant and bought a giant soda. He was 10 years old.
The view from the observation deck “really was a ‘pinch me’ moment,” he recalled. But it was the soda that he talked about last week in the context of his new job as chief executive of the New York Climate Exchange.
The soda was “an instant revelation” to a child from West Africa that “America is so full of energy that we can fill up a giant soda with crushed ice,” he said.
“I had never seen that much ice because in Africa back then, and even now, you get one cube of ice,” he added. “You’re lucky to get it and don’t ask for more.”
Ice is, of course, made by refrigeration, which takes electricity, which takes energy to generate. “And to come back all these years later, standing here looking at that building,” he said, “I’m thinking I get to be here and I’m dealing with the same issue that kicked it off.”
Delving into potential solutions to the climate crisis was not the only appeal of the job. The climate exchange, a consortium with 48 partners led by Stony Brook University, is planning a campus on Governors Island. The preconstruction work and approvals are expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Sanjayan, who was the chief executive of Conservation International for eight years until last summer, is the second chief executive of the climate exchange. When the first, Stephen Hammer, took the job in 2023, he said that he expected the exchange to function as “part think tank, part do tank.”
But the exchange also raised $77 million from philanthropy and government funding on Hammer’s watch, and worked to launch initiatives on, among other things, artificial intelligence, urban resilience and next-generation climate finance. The exchange says Sanjayan will shepherd a new climate data initiative.
Hammer noted in an email that during his time with the climate exchange, it worked on “dozens of hours” of programming for Climate Week NYC, the annual gathering in September that bills itself as the world’s largest climate event. It is organized by Climate Group, a nonprofit.
Sanjayan noted that Climate Week “spreads out across the city.”
“Is it at the U.N.? Is it at the various hotels? Is it at the convention center? There isn’t a central place,” he said. “We could use this campus as one of those gathering places.”
METROPOLITAN diary
S. Klein’s basement
It was around 1960, and my mother, my sister and I were in the bargain basement at the S. Klein department store on Union Square.
My sister, 13, was trying on winter coats in the aisle between the bins and discussing two final options with my mother when a woman riding the escalator up to the ground floor weighed in.
“Take the red!” she called out.
We took the red. I miss S. Klein’s.
— David Hammond
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Love It or Hate It, the Met Gala Is Here appeared first on New York Times.
