Laura Blum

Finally you can finally stop kicking yourself for missing The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster show China: Through the Looking Glass. In making it the focus of The First Monday in May, filmmaker Andrew Rossi has you covered.

Rossi grants a privileged look behind the scenes at the process of conceiving and mounting what went down in Met history as its best-attended exhibition. There’s more texture and fiber onscreen than what you could reasonably expect from the original spectacle.

The referenced May Monday is the 2015 Met Gala. As the fateful date nears, Bolton and his team race against the calendar to pull off the exhibition for the guests to see. And what guests they are. George and Amal Clooney! Jean-Paul Gaultier! The queen of the night, Rihanna! Leave it to Gala co-chair and Vogue editrix Anna Wintour to rope in a Who’s Who of celebrities and fashion potentates — and a tidy sum of $120 million.

"You need the mixture of art and commerce," Wintour observes. Her comment is as apt for couture in general as for the Met exhibition — and clearly too for the Gala. Engineering the seating arrangements seems as intricate as a NASA mission and arguably as high-risk.

The dewier protagonist of this vérité buddy film is Met curator Andrew Bolton, mastermind of the featured extravaganza about Chinese-inspired Western fashion. Graced with the reticent charm of a British school boy, Bolton is at once hailed as a creative and conceptual genius, yet he’s blushingly insecure in his ability to make timely strategic decisions. It’s sweet if surprising to see the reedy 48 year old express doubts about being up to Museum snuff. He even frets about keeping up with his own par; the 2011 sensation Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty drew a whopping 661,509 visitors. Mirroring Bolton’s struggle to transcend that “albatross,” Rossi lingers perhaps more than China merits on the marvels of McQueen. Full story here:

http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1206/the_first_monday_in_may_the_first_night_at_the