Every year, actors, musicians and models team up with big-name designers to have some fun with fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dress code for the annual Met Gala fund-raiser corresponds to an exhibition at the museum’s Costume Institute. In 2015 that show was “China: Through the Looking Glass,” and the fitfully engaging documentary “The First Monday in May” takes a peek behind the scenes of both the exhibition and the party.
Beginning about eight months before the gala, director Andrew Rossi (“Ivory Tower,” “Page One: Inside the New York Times”) introduces us to the masterminds of the complementary events: Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton and party planner Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue. To the casual fashion fan, Wintour may be the movie’s biggest draw — a chance to see what the woman who inspired “The Devil Wears Prada” is really like.
She doesn’t disappoint. She wears sunglasses during business meetings and recoils at the sight of a video installation in the lobby of her newly designed offices. When she and her minions iron out the seating charts, first names suffice as they juggle where to place Jessica, Kate, Harvey and Julianne (that would be Chastain, Hudson, Weinstein and Moore).
Bolton has a less commanding presence, but the British curator makes an amiable tour guide. He may look fashionable now in his cropped pantsuits and thick-rimmed glasses, but he insists that he still feels like “a little kid from Lancashire, totally in awe.”
