Anna Wintour Discusses Her First Met Gala & How She Couldn't Afford to Attend the Dinner
Anna Wintour is opening up about the first time she attended the Met Gala and how she wasn’t able to afford to attend the dinner portion of the evening.
While Anna didn’t take over the Met Gala until 1995, it has been an event since 1948!
When Anna attended the gala for the first time, she was a junior editor at New York Magazine and the person in charge of the event was former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland.
Keep reading to find out more…
“I had been aware of The Met and the work that they did when I was first living in New York and was a Junior Editor at New York Magazine,” Anna said on the iHeartPodcast Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi
She continued, “I remember going to The Met when I was there… and just being awed by what Mrs. Vreeland had done. It just seemed it was the most glamorous evening I’d ever been at… I didn’t go to the dinner. I couldn’t afford to go to the dinner. I was just at the cocktails.”
After Vreeland‘s death in 1989, the event went without a leader until Anna took over in 1995 at the request of Oscar de la Renta and his wife Annette.
“They called me a million years ago and said, ‘Would you ever consider helping the Costume Institute?’” Anna said. “…When Annette and Oscar called me… and asked me to see if I could help, there was not a grand plan. I just did it because if Oscar called, you always said yes.”
She continued, “I really was very naive, I think. I didn’t realize what I was stepping into and it just became something that I felt more and more passionate about over the years… It just grew over the years, but I can’t pretend that there was a grand plan or a grand strategy.”
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