Met Gala Boycotts Walk a Superfine Line This Year.
Why Jack Schlossberg's call to boycott the Met Gala this year is wrong.
Kennedy nepo baby, former Vogue political correspondent and previous Met Gala attendee Jack Schlossberg has called for a boycott of the Costume Institute’s biggest fundraising event of the year due to “so much happening at home and around the world.” Gee, I wonder what Schlossberg might be referring to since he’s wilfully opaque in his multiple Instagram posts about the Gala.
While in previous years, such as 2023’s party and exhibition honouring the problematic late Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld, the 2022 event to which Kim Kardashian wore and ruined Marilyn Monroe’s dress on the same day that the Supreme Court’s opinion on Dobbs V. Jackson Women’s Health resulting in the overturning of Roe V. Wade was leaked, or last year when pro-Palestinian activists demonstrated outside, a protest may have been warranted, asking for a boycott this year seems particularly out of touch.
2025’s theme is Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, centring Black dandyism and how Black style has influenced American fashion (and I’ll be covering it for BBC for the second year in a row!). It’s based on guest curator Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism & the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. The co-chairs are Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and honorary chair LeBron James, the first all-Black committee (baring Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, who has headed up the committee as chairperson of the Gala since 1995) in 15 years.
The last time the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute held an exhibition centred on race was 2015’s China: Through the Looking Glass, which courted controversy.
It seems the Institute has learned from its mistakes, with a lot of care taken to incorporate Miller’s findings as co-curator, while Vogue’s coverage in the lead up to the Gala has been monumental, featuring four covers featuring the co-chairs, copious photoshoots with all manner of Black tastemakers (my only criticism is that I wish they would have incorporated more Black photographers, instead of having Tyler Mitchel shoot the entire campaign), and plenty of explainers about the theme, perhaps to ward off any cultural appropriation in the outfits of Met Gala attendees. Although the dress code for the Gala is “Tailored to You” so there shouldn’t be too much of that. I’m very excited to see what everyone comes up with.
When the theme was announced in October last year prior to the re-election of Donald Trump, no one could have imagined how prescient it would be six months later (or maybe they could if they read Project 2025).
Within Trump’s first 100 days back in office he has cancelled an exhibition of Black artists at the Art Museum of the Americas, while the head of the National Museum of African American History and Culture stepped down amidst attempts to remove artefacts, such as the Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter where Black activists staged a sit-in in 1960, and/or return them to their original owners, as has occurred with Reverend Brown’s bible and book History of the Negro Race in America by George Washington Williams which he loaned to the museum. This is all part of wider anti-DEI initiatives that the administration says “promote improper ideology,” you know, like how the United States was founded on genocide and slavery. Maybe that’s what Schlossberg meant about everything that’s “happening at home and around the world.”
This is why he’s wrong to call for a boycott of the Met Gala this year. If anything, we should be looking at how museums are funded, why the Costume Institute is the only department of the Met that is forced to seek its own funding (cos fashion isn’t art amiright) and why the uber-rich will increasingly be the only hope for many of these museums as the government continues to target them.