Met Gala: Anna Wintour wears a floor length blue blazer
Anna Wintour arrives to the Met Gala in a silky, floral-detailed dress and floor length blue blazer.
The Met Gala honored Black men in fashion on Monday. The truth is far more complicated.
For the 2025 fête, Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and organizers chose to honor oft overlooked Black men in fashion as they raised funds for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute on May 5.
The event paid homage to the debonair flair of Black menswear and its evolution over the centuries as ateliers reimagined celebrities as the Black “dandy.”
But the gala’s first nod to Black history omitted Wintour’s own complex relationship with race, best demonstrated in her fraught, decadeslong friendship with the late Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley.
The show honored Talley, who died in 2022 at 73, but also left out racial missteps made by Vogue over the past decade.
“He understood that, especially as a Black man, what you wore told a story about you, about your history, about self-respect,” Wintour wrote of Talley in an April tribute about this year’s theme. “And so, for André, getting dressed was an act of autobiography, and also mischief and fantasy, and so much else at once.”
André and Anna: How fashion created iconic frenemies
Wintour, a white Brit, and Talley, who grew up Black in North Carolina, became fast friends when the latter began working at Vogue in 1983.
In 1988, when Wintour was named editor-in-chief, Talley became creative director, later serving as Vogue’s editor-at-large. Both broke respective ground in the ultra-gatekept American fashion industry.
But later, tensions arose. The pair’s first falling out was in 1995 over creative differences. They made up and fell out again in 2018, when Wintour took away Talley’s hosting role on the Met Gala red carpet, replacing her longtime friend with YouTube sensation Liza Koshy.
“I think she thought I was too fat and too old. … She just became bigger than life. She has no time for me,” Talley wrote in his 2020 memoir “The Chiffon Trenches.”
In an interview that year, Talley got candid with “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Gayle King about the duo’s downfall.
“This is a painful thing for me, but it is a love letter about the joys as well as the lows of my life. And the joys of my life have been with Anna Wintour,” he told King.
“I owe to her the pioneering role that I had of a creative director of Vogue. I was the first Black man to ever be named such. I owe that to Anna Wintour. I owe her much. And I think, in turn, I think she owes me,” he continued.
Despite Talley relationship, Wintour, Vogue have complicated history with race
Wintour’s, at times, controversial relationship with Black celebrities extends beyond the inner workings of her Talley rift.
This year’s event featured a first: an all-Black slate of male co-hosts including singer-songwriter and Louis Vuitton creative director Pharrell Williams, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo, Grammy-nominated rapper A$AP Rocky and British racecar driver Lewis Hamilton as well as Wintour.
Pro basketball player LeBron James, regarded by some as the NBA’s greatest of all time, was named honorary co-chair. But on the first Monday of Maya announced online that he would miss the annual fundraiser over an injury.
The Los Angeles Lakers star made history with Vogue in 2008 when he was the first Black man to land on the cover of the fashion magazine, alongside supermodel Gisele Bündchen for a spread that sparked widespread backlash for conjuring negative stereotypes of Black men.
James was pictured in a suggestive gorilla-like pose, mouth open wide, as his right hand dribbled a ball with the other wrapped around Bundchen’s waist. Annie Leibovitz, the famed celebrity photographer and a Wintour favorite, shot the cover.
Anna Wintour apologized in 2020 after death of George Floyd
In the years that followed, Leibovitz and Vogue have frequently been criticized for their framing and lighting of Black cover stars including associate Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Olympic gold medalist and gymnast Simone Biles and actress Zendaya.
Vogue has also been criticized widely for its vast hiring of white staffers and its common usage of white cover stars, designers and models.
Anna Wintour reportedly apologized and addressed racial disparities in the wake of roiling racial conversations in America following the respective May deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.
“I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes,” Wintour wrote in an internal email, according to The New York Times and People.
Black and gay actor Billy Porter, one of the world’s most famed dandies, is reportedly banned from the affair after racial criticism of Wintour.
In 2023, he slammed the selection of Harry Styles as the first man to grace the cover of American Vogue solo, suggesting the Grammy winner landed the cover because he is “white and straight.”
On the December 2020 cover, the “As It Was” singer wore a lace Gucci ballgown.
During an interview with British outlet The Telegraph, Porter described a conversation with Wintour in the months leading up to Styles’ cover and referred to the editor-in-chief using an expletive.
“(She) said to me at the end, ‘How can we do better?’ And I was so taken off guard that I didn’t say what I should have said,” Porter told the outlet, admitting he told Wintour to “use your power as Vogue to uplift the voices of the leaders of this de-gendering of fashion movement … Six months later, Harry Styles is the first man on the cover.”
‘He taught me to speak fearlessly and see from the heart’
Months after Talley’s death, an old friend delivered a tribute to a fellow fashion icon during a memorial service in New York City.
“Like all of us here today, I felt lucky to consider him part of my family,” Wintour told fellow mourners on April 29 that year. “He taught me to speak fearlessly and to see from the heart. I miss him in moments of sadness, but most of all, moments of joy.”
Maybe after all their differences and disagreements, rifts and resolutions, that is what she owed him.
“André never had an ounce of shame. I’ll be thinking of him on the night of the Met Gala, an evening made for him—and one I can scarcely believe he will miss,” Wintour wrote earlier this year.
The first Monday in May might not be around always. Though some friendships, confusing and complicated, last forever.
Contributing: Edward Segarra, Elise Brisco, Rasha Ali
