Inside the gala has most politically charged for years

Last October, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced that his next fashion show, “superfine: black style tailoring”, the political landscape was very different.

Kamala Harris, the first woman vice-president and the first black woman to exceed a major ticket, took place in the last weeks of her campaign for the White House. The show, the culmination of five years of work by Andrew Bolton, the curator of the costume in charge, to diversify the assets and shows of the department following the racial calculation caused by the murder of George Floyd, seemed for a long time.

On Monday, however, when he finally opens up to star guests during his signature gala, the most splashing party of the year, he will do it in a very different world. The one in which the federal government has functionally declared war on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as programming linked to race – in particular in cultural institutions.

In February, President Trump took control of the Kennedy Center, promising to make his programming less “awake”. Then, at the end of March, he signed an executive decree targeting what the administration described as “an inappropriate ideology, divider or anti-American” at the museums of the Smithsonian and threatened to retain funds for exhibitions which “divide the Americans by race”.

In this context, the spectacle of the Met, devoted for the first time entirely to color designers, which focuses on how black men used fashion as a tool for self-activation, revolution and subversion through American history and the black diaspora, has taken a completely different relevance.

Suddenly, puts it, one of the richest and most established museums in the world, began to look like resistance. And the gala, which has been criticized in recent years as a demonstration of privileges and absurdity of fashion, is considered to be what Brandice Daniel, the founder of the Harlem fashion line, a platform created to support color creators, called an “Allyship” demonstration.