Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue and artistic director of Condé Nast, continues apace her campaign to shape public perception of fashion. She uses her magazine to do it, of course, but she is also doing it on a different scale through film — for the big screen and small.
The latest example is “The First Monday in May,” a documentary directed by Andrew Rossi, which opened the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday night. (Mr. Rossi also directed “Page One,” a documentary on The New York Times.) The new movie tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 2015 Met Gala, the opening party of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute show, as well as the exhibition it celebrated, “China Through the Looking Glass.”
The feature film follows “The Fashion Fund,” the TV and video series now on Amazon that chronicled the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund process over several seasons as emerging designers applied for the prize and the committee (including Ms. Wintour) selected winners; “The September Issue,” R. J. Cutler’s 2009 runaway hit on the making of Vogue’s largest issue of that year; and the 2000 BBC show that arguably started it all, “Boss Women: Anna Wintour.”
It’s an interesting body of work mostly because it covers Ms. Wintour’s highly effective and efficient persona, her magazine, the need to nurture the next big American designer and the importance of fashion to the Met, all of which adds up to what looks like an extended argument that fashion is not the superficial pastime it is so often labeled — “First Monday” being no exception.
Though it is being marketed as a kind of tell-all about the party (and there are some terrific table-planning moments, as well as the revelation that having Rihanna play your gig costs more than even Vogue imagined), its real subject is the tension that still exists around fashion’s place in a museum. The film’s purpose is partly to put that issue to rest once and for all.
To this end, it focuses on Andrew Bolton, the China show’s curator, and on the extraordinary efforts he went to for the exhibition: securing the clothes, negotiating with the curator of the Met’s Asian art galleries, where the exhibition was housed (the curator was naturally nervous about the art being overwhelmed by the fashion) and sidestepping the political risks. The end result was an enormously successful product that became one of the museum’s most-visited shows.
Mr. Bolton is a charming, authentic presence. And the film is full of fashion world and celebrity cameos: John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Kate Hudson, the above-mentioned Rihanna. However, none of them can compete with Ms. Wintour onscreen, in part because at this stage, and after all those films (and as her brief appearance in “Zoolander II” demonstrated), she has perfected playing her own character.
As the director Baz Luhrmann, a consultant on the China show, pointed out in “First Monday,” “Anna Wintour” is as much a creation as any dress: one that takes an external stereotype — Mr. Rossi implicitly links it to the “dragon lady” of cliché — and turns it to her own end.
Watching her bend Met curators to her will provides some of the film’s most dramatic moments — whether telling Harold Koda, the then-Costume Institute chief curator (he has since retired), that he will “figure out” how to disinvite some guests to the dinner to keep numbers down, or suggesting that the museum will have to close the Temple of Dendur the day before the party, even if that means barring tourists, or dismissing anyone’s need to see a Tiffany pillar, because the space is needed for a table representing money for the museum.
(Also: She even wears those dark Chanel sunglasses at home, when she is otherwise in jeans and loafers.)
Now the challenge is whether, with this film, she can also convince viewers of the absolute legitimacy of her chosen field as artistic artifact. If so, it may be the real measure of the movie’s success.
