Conversely, Wintour operates with the efficiency of a political strategist. When Bolton hesitates over a seating chart—debating whether to place a tech CEO next to a Chinese minister—Wintour overrides him: “We need youth. We need noise. We need Instagram.” The film subtly critiques Wintour’s pragmatism while simultaneously acknowledging that her celebrity-driven machinery generates the $15 million necessary for Bolton’s intellectual project.
Andrew Rossi’s 2016 documentary, The First Monday in May , provides an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 Costume Institute exhibition, China: Through the Looking Glass , and its accompanying gala. This paper argues that the film functions as a complex text on the tensions between high art and commercial fashion, Eastern and Western cultural authority, and the invisible labor that sustains the spectacle of the Met Gala. By analyzing the film’s depiction of curator Andrew Bolton’s academic rigor versus celebrity chairperson Anna Wintour’s branding machinery, this paper explores how the documentary both critiques and celebrates the economization of museum culture in the 21st century. 1. Introduction On the first Monday of May 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Roman galleries were temporarily decontextualized. Hundreds of mannequins draped in Yves Saint Laurent, Guo Pei, and Alexander McQueen stood alongside ancient Chinese bronzes and classical marble statues. The occasion was China: Through the Looking Glass , the highest-attended fashion exhibition in the Met’s history. Andrew Rossi’s documentary, The First Monday in May , captures the eight-month struggle to mount this exhibition, framing it as a battleground for three distinct conflicts: art versus artifact, scholarship versus celebrity, and appropriation versus homage. The First Monday In May
The film’s title itself is ironic. The “First Monday in May” is the Met Gala—an event that, in 2015, had become a global media spectacle. But the film spends only its final 25 minutes on the Gala itself. The preceding 65 minutes are devoted to research, installation, negotiation, and doubt. Rossi’s argument, therefore, is that the real story is not the red carpet, but the invisible labor and ethical compromise that make the red carpet possible. Conversely, Wintour operates with the efficiency of a
The film’s climax is not the Gala itself, but the morning after, when the museum opens to the public. Rossi films a young Chinese-American woman staring at a Guo Pei dress next to a Tang dynasty horse. She whispers to her friend, “It’s like they’re talking to each other.” For a brief moment, the curatorial thesis—that objects across time can converse—achieves its intended effect. The film suggests that despite the corruption of the fundraising machine, the democratic encounter between a visitor and an object remains the museum’s core redemption. The First Monday in May ultimately performs a double gesture. On one hand, it is a hagiography of Andrew Bolton and, by extension, the Costume Institute’s ability to elevate fashion to the status of fine art. On the other hand, it is a sharp ethnographic critique of how money, celebrity, and Western institutional power shape narratives about other cultures. We need Instagram