Tonight Isn't About the Fashion!

...or is it? Some quick memories from my time at the Met Gala.

Photo: Getty Images

The one time I attended the Met Gala as a guest, I was invited four days before the event. The theme was Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, so I immediately called the young British designer Charles Jeffrey and asked for one of his monastic-looking dresses. (It arrived on Monday afternoon in New Jersey and then got held in customs, and my poor assistant had to go and wrestle it out of the FedEx facility to get it back to me in time.) I couldn’t find anyone to do hair or makeup for me that night, so my colleague at Allure gave me an impromptu smoky eye while I sat in my office chair. I finally reached for the shoes that came with the look right before I had to walk out the door, and realized in horror that they were heels. So for this, the first Monday in May, fashion’s most important night of the year, I would be wearing a dress and heels for the very first time—walking up the longest flight of stairs you could ever imagine.

There are a lot more fun anecdotes to this story, but some of them I have to save for the book. (I am especially dying to tell you the Amal Clooney bit, but I don’t want my editor to kill me!) That night, the first Monday in May, was easily one of the most special in my life. The hair was wrong, the makeup was wrong, the outfit needed more thoughtful styling and someone really should’ve taken my Apple Watch off before I was in front of a single camera, but none of it actually mattered. That was never what it was about, really—not for me, anyway.

Vogue, the publication whose editor makes the Met possible, was my adolescent refuge. When I came out of the closet at 14, I was convinced I had no choice but to leave Catholicism. After all, why would I want to be part of a religion that I felt didn’t want me? It was around this time that I started to be less afraid to pick up the magazines and books I always wanted, so I reignited my love for fashion and fell into the pages of Vogue. There was an issue where Anna Wintour herself—before we all knew her thanks to The Devil Wears Prada—talked about the importance of marriage equality. I was stunned to see support for gay marriage articulated in a fashion magazine, especially by a straight woman. That’s when Vogue (and fashion) became sacred to me: a place where I could finally, actually be myself. I left Catholicism and found a new religion.

Naturally, this warranted a pilgrimage. In my senior year of high school, one of my best friends begged her mother to drive us from Boston to New York just to see the Model as Muse exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went to the museum, clutching our copies of Vogue, and relished in all the images of the greats: Iman, Penelope Tree, Veruschka, Dovima, China Machado, Carmen Ddell’Orefice. I sat in the final room of the exhibition, where Lenny Kravitz’s American Woman was playing on a loop, and promised myself that one day, I’d get to go to the Gala. 

They say you should be as specific as possible when setting an intention, and I think they might be right. Just a few years later, I was invited to the Met Gala—as a Vogue intern. At one point in the night, I had to shuffle through a crowd of celebrities (the Olsen Twins, Rihanna, the Jonas Brothers, who all asked me where the bathroom was and I didn’t know) to hand memory cards to Vogue’s red carpet photographer. The photo line stank of sweat, hundreds of black lenses all pointed carefully like guns at a shooting range. And then, she appeared as if she descended from heaven: Beyoncé. The flashbulbs popped on her purple Givenchy dress, and the photographers started roaring for her attention. Amidst all the chaos, she was steady, slow, graceful. All of that screaming and commotion, and she merely took her time, adjusted her dress, and kept ascending until she disappeared into the museum. 

Attending the Gala is obviously very different from working it. Before, I was relegated to the photo line and the basement of the museum, where we held our “war room” for coverage. Then five or so years later, I was inside, having champagne outside of the Met’s famous installation of an Egyptian temple. We were all ushered into a separate room, where a choir of boys from the Vatican was singing. The acoustics in the space made it so that their voices vibrated off the walls and enveloped your ears. It was the same music my dad used to play when we went to Church on Sundays. 

It was never lost on me that the one Met Gala I attended had to do with Catholicism. At the apex of my time in publishing—a career I pursued with ruthless abandon after I came out of the closet and decided to leave the Church—I was sitting in a room with fashion’s luminaries on one side, and the Archdiocese of New York on another…while wearing a dress and heels. God’s got one hell of a sense of humor. 

I could wax poetic about the underlying messages from the exhibition that night—the role that vestments and adornment play in religious ritual, denoting their significance for transcendence. In fact, I thought it was going to be the bulk of my thesis at Harvard Divinity School. We could point to the Benedictine or Carmelite orders in Catholicism and their rigid aesthetic dress codes, or the opulence of certain Orthodox sects’ garments and their role in translating divine beauty. We could interrogate how some forms of Christianity use beauty as a physical manifestation of virtuosity, and how complicated that can get when we consider the Church’s rebranding of Jesus (a Palestinian Jewish man) into a lithe, white, blonde twink with sparkling blue eyes. There’s essay upon essay to write about the genderless garments of the clergy, and what that says about proximity to the divine: do we need to give up our sexuality or gender identity in order to access God? Should those things remain a mystery—or, in another reading, unimportant—when it comes to attaining the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven? 

But the more I tried to get closer to God, the less all of that seemed to really matter (to me, at least). Fashion for me was never about the clothes or the adornment, although those things are very fun. Instead, fashion helped me to finally feel safe—like I was being saved. It felt like a place where the outcasts could come together and give the world something beautiful, despite all the ugliness the world had handed us. That night at the Met, scores of queer designers—from Lee Alexander McQueen to Jean Paul Gaultier—took their Christian guilt and transformed it into breathtaking beauty. They showed me that sometimes, the best pathway to peace isn’t closing doors or burning bridges or turning one’s back, but looking your demons in the face for so long that you start to see their beauty. They used darkness as their mold, and then they let it be a light. I wonder where they got that from.

Tonight, I’m really excited to be joining the team at E! to discuss the Met Gala. I’ll be on your television screens from 6PM until 9PM EST, and I’m joined by some lovely people including Karamo, Zanna Roberts Rossi, and Camille Kostek. Then tomorrow, it’s finally back to Cambridge to finish these finals. I am wishing you all a happy Monday, and a beautiful start to the week.