Met Gala 2022 exhibit set to highlight top Hollywood directors

Hollywood will have a strong presence at this year’s Met Gala — and not only on the red carpet. 

A group of top film directors including Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Regina King and last year’s Oscar winner Chloé Zhao will be a key part of the Costume Institute exhibit launching the gala in May.

Star curator Andrew Bolton on Tuesday announced the list of eight directors who will create what he called “cinematic vignettes” in the period rooms of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reported The Associated Press.

The other four exhibitors are Janicza Bravo, Julie Dash, Autumn de Wilde and Tom Ford, the celebrated fashion designer who is also a film director.

The latest exhibit — In America: An Anthology of Fashion — is actually the second part of a major two-part show exploring the roots of American fashion.

The first part opened in September along with a pared-down “mini-gala,” one of two galas planned within one year as the Costume Institute grapples with pandemic restrictions, like every other arts institution.

This exhibit, to open along with what the museum hopes will be a full-sized gala on May 2 — a return to the traditional first Monday in May — will feature about 100 examples of men’s and women’s fashion from the 19th to the mid-late 20th century.

Whereas Part One, which will remain on display in the rooms of the Anna Wintour Costume Center, explores “a new language of American fashion,” Part Two looks at “unfamiliar sartorial narratives filtered through the imaginations of some of America’s most visionary film directors,” Bolton said.

This year’s exhibit would focus on key individuals shaping American fashion through history, most of them women, and many of them overlooked by history — not just designers but tailors and dressmakers, for example.

Bolton said Scorsese would show his work in a 20th- century living room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and King in a 19th-century parlour from Richmond, Virginia.

De Wilde will show hers in the Baltimore and Benkard Rooms; Zhao in a Shaker Retiring Room from the 1830s; Bravo in the Rococo Revival Parlour and Gothic Revival Library; Coppola in the McKim, Mead and White Stair Hall and Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room; Dash in the Greek Revival Parlour and Renaissance Revival Room; and Ford in the gallery showcasing John Vanderlyn’s panoramic 1819 mural of Versailles.

The Met Gala is a huge money-maker for the museum, and provides the Costume Institute with its main source of funding. 

In America: An Anthology of Fashion opens to the public May 7, five days after the May 2 gala, and runs until September 5, along with Part One. - AP