The First Monday in May
Andrew Rossi (2016)
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is open every day of the year except four. The exceptions are Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and the first Monday in May, when the annual benefit gala of the Met’s Costume Institute takes place. Andrew Rossi’s documentary is about preparations for the 2015 gala, and a whole lot else besides. The gala launched the Met’s ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ show, curated by Andrew Bolton, and The First Monday in May follows that show’s development over a period of several months. The film also includes pronouncements (rather than debate) about fashion as art and, as if R J Cutler’s The September Issue (2009) were not enough, describes the power and personality of Anna Wintour. Chair of the Met gala committee since 1995, Wintour is considered chiefly responsible for the event’s huge and sustained success as a fund-raiser: the Costume Institute resides in what is now the Anna Wintour Costume Center.
A prologue tells us that ‘Savage Beauty’, the Costume Institute’s 2011 show in celebration of the recently deceased Alexander McQueen, changed critical perceptions about the status of fashion as an art form. A postscript to the film explains that ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ became one of the most popular exhibitions ever mounted by the Met: by the end of August 2015, the show had attracted some 670,000 visitors, breaking the record, set by ‘Savage Beauty’, for a Costume Institute show. Between the prologue and the postscript, there are several reminders, from Anna Wintour and others, that fashion is driven by the imperatives of both art and commerce. The implication is that this combination is peculiar to fashion and one contributor says that its commercial aspect – its ‘impurity’ – is why fashion struggles for acceptance as art. Neither suggestion is convincing. The tension between creative freedom and commercial considerations clearly isn’t unique to fashion – cinema is just the most obvious other example. A picture’s high selling price in the upper reaches of the art world is unlikely to detract from its artistic reputation. The talking heads in The First Monday in May keep straining for the cultural high ground yet it’s commercial outcome that repeatedly registers as, in their eyes, the final proof of value. This is striking: you wouldn’t get people in an artistically pretentious documentary about a movie-maker justifying her or him as an auteur on the basis of box-office takings.
The film’s contributors are often at pains to present themselves as conscientious but their consciences don’t put up much of a fight. We learn that the top people in the Costume Institute agonised over whether, little more than a year after Alexander McQueen’s suicide, it was too soon for ‘Savage Beauty’. (The show opened at the Met on 4 May 2011 so must have gone into development well before the first anniversary of McQueen’s death in February 2010.) It seems the organisers’ minds were put at rest by the record-breaking ticket sales (there’s no suggestion that any of those tickets could have been bought by ghouls). When the celebrity guests arrive for the 2015 Met gala, one of the talking heads admits to having worried that some might turn up in tasteless travesties of Chinese costume – and to relief that his fears have proved unfounded. In the event, he says, the stars whose designers have opted for chinoiserie have been sensitively creative – though it’s hard to imagine, looking at some of the outfits, what would count as a tasteless travesty if these don’t. The logic seems to be that, if a costume photographs well for the pages of fashion or society magazines, it’s morally irreproachable. By the end of The First Monday in May, the man behind the camera appears to judge worth in the same way as the people in front of the camera. The legend that Andrew Rossi puts on the screen about visitor numbers for ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ has the force of a succinct, complete vindication of the show.
When Sally and I went to see ‘Savage Beauty’ at the V&A in 2015, I was struck by the fact that Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary creations weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. Each display was supplemented by the late designer’s words – explanations of how his work reflected his views about anthropology, ecology, politics and so on. It was as if, in order to take McQueen seriously as an artist, we needed to believe he was an intellectual too (in spite of his humble beginnings, which were also stressed). McQueen’s statements were sometimes self-contradictory and nearly always surplus to requirements. I don’t see enough exhibitions in art galleries to know if this kind of verbiage – from the creator of the work rather than the curator of the exhibition – is unusual but I was often reminded of it watching The First Monday in May. Karl Lagerfeld’s description of his work as applied art is, in the context of the film as a whole, unusually convincing: the insistence by others on fashion’s artistic credentials is more anxious than persuasive. Harold Koda, Curator-in-Chief of the Costume Institute at the time the film was being made, claims that the coming together of high fashion and celebrity at the Met gala results in ‘something bigger than both … it’s transcendent’. You naturally want Koda to tell us what he means by this but words fail him. ‘Fashion,’ according to Anna Wintour, ‘is able to touch us and move us – what more could you want from art?’ Well, you might, for example, want art to make you think or to challenge the way you see the world. For Wintour, though, that may be beside the point: she probably feels she’s done the necessary by (again) putting the words ‘fashion’ and ‘art’ into the same sentence. The motto of the people Andrew Rossi shows us – right through to a young man who, over the closing credits, exclaims OMG-ishly about the images of the previous night’s gala on his computer screen – might be summarised as ‘Only assert’.
For me, the urgent yet hollow but-is-it-art aspect of The First Monday in May upstaged its other elements, the Anna Wintour phenomenon included. As she enters the Met, armed with a comically grande coffee, the camera catches Wintour against a poster for an exhibition entitled ‘Death Becomes Her’: this isn’t the only moment when she verges on channelling Meryl Streep channelling Anna Wintour. An interviewer asks her thoughts on Lauren Weisberger, who wrote The Devil Wears Prada after working as Wintour’s assistant. Wintour’s careful response is entirely consistent with the all-publicity-is-good-publicity ethos of her world but I didn’t understand why Andrew Rossi included this, or footage of Wintour analysing her famous decisiveness and telling staff off for the look of new offices that Vogue is moving to. None of these things is immediately relevant to preparations for the Met gala, or shows Anna Wintour in anything approaching a new light. (They do confirm, though, the impression I got from the recent BBC documentary series Absolutely Fashion, that Alexandra Shulman, Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, is a more interesting character than she is.) Wintour’s painstaking participation in the details of the gala is occasionally more engaging – she’s hands-on to the extent of fractionally adjusting the position of chairs at the dinner tables.
The curator Andrew Bolton, who grew up in a small town in Lancashire, is amusing when he recounts a careers adviser visiting his secondary school and asking Bolton what he wanted to be when he grew up: the answer was curator of the Met’s Costume Institute. (The what-happened-next legends at the end of The First Monday in May explain that, in September 2015, it was announced that Bolton would succeed Harold Koda as the Institute’s Curator-in-Chief.) Bolton is more predictable in what he has to say as ‘Through the Looking Glass’ takes shape, although this impression is probably created as much by Andrew Rossi’s shallow approach as by Bolton himself. The Met’s head of Asian art expresses discreet but definite concerns that artefacts from the collection are liable to be used as, in effect, stage props for the clothes on display in ‘Through the Looking Glass’. This tension isn’t investigated: the polite Asian art man confirms that the final exhibition is fine by him, even though it’s far from clear how his concerns have been addressed. The show explores the influence of Chinese design on Western fashion over a period of several centuries. Wong Kar Wai is recruited as an adviser largely, it seems, because of Andrew Bolton’s enthusiasm for the costume designs in In the Mood for Love but at least Bolton takes heed of Wong’s quietly trenchant advice against putting an image of Mao in the middle of a display of Buddha sculptures. There are some prickly exchanges when Bolton and Wintour visit China and talk with journalists there about the show, and a few sharp comments about the state of (under)development of modern Chinese aesthetics. Rossi’s coverage of the final preparations for ‘Through the Looking Glass’ is conventional down-to-the-wire stuff, familiar from countless television programmes about completing a project on schedule and, like all those programmes, resulting in emphatic triumph. The costume exhibits themselves are remarkable and often beautiful. Seeing them on film was, for this viewer, much preferable to traipsing round a museum.
4 October 2016