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.
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. The First Monday In May
This paper posits that the film’s primary achievement is its refusal to resolve these tensions. Instead, Rossi presents the Met Gala—and the exhibition it funds—as a ritual of hierarchical reinforcement, where cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1979) is displayed, exchanged, and occasionally challenged. Through a close reading of key sequences, this analysis will demonstrate how the documentary exposes the structural paradoxes of major institutional curation. The documentary’s most explicit dramatic engine is the partnership between Andrew Bolton, the soft-spoken, Oxford-educated curator of the Costume Institute, and Anna Wintour, the monolithic editor-in-chief of Vogue and the gala’s long-time chairperson. Conversely, Wintour operates with the efficiency of a
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. We need Instagram
The Spectacle of Hierarchy: Curatorial Authority, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Labor of Luxury in The First Monday in May