In the new documentary “The First Monday in May,” premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival April 13, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour presides over the Met Ball seating chart, swapping around nearly 600 luminaries — including George Clooney, Jennifer Lawrence and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rogers, generously qualified as “Olivia Munn’s BF.”
Suddenly, Wintour points to one of the names typed out on a blue sticker (the film obscures the name at Wintour’s request).
“I thought he wasn’t coming,” Wintour says, cool as ice to her party commander-in-chief, Sylvana Durrett.
“I know, but then he decided he wanted to come,” responds Durrett, clutching her Starbucks coffee like a shield.
“OK, can he not be on his cellphone the entire time then?”
After all, if you want to party with Anna, you’ve got to party by her rules.
Since Wintour took the reins of the Met Gala in 1995, she has turned the event from an intimate society affair into one of the biggest, splashiest, most anticipated — and most mysterious — parties of the season.
“It’s very secretive,” Vogue contributing editor Plum Sykes, who’s wearing Roland Mouret to this year’s extravaganza, tells The Post. “[Wintour] doesn’t want anyone to know what she’s planning or what she’s up to until the minute they walk down that red carpet and through the door.”
Yet somehow Wintour agreed to open up her secret world for the documentary’s director, Andrew Rossi, giving him exclusive access to last year’s party and behind-the-scenes machinations — including food tastings at her West Village townhouse and a rare look at the editor in jeans and flats (no surprise, she still looked chic).
“There were a lot of protocols to follow. There were certain times when Anna would say, ‘I’m done, I don’t want to film anymore,’ ” says Rossi.
For Wintour, there’s no room for error when it comes to the $25,000-per-ticket bash, which marks the grand opening of the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“She wants to make sure it’s executed flawlessly,” says Durrett. “She is very hands-on.”
Literally.
In one scene, Wintour, decked out in Chanel and her go-to Manolos Blahniks, takes it upon herself to physically move tables and chairs to ensure guests will be comfortable.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who was the head of events at Vogue for 11 years until 2009, when she became the Lincoln Center fashion director, says such behavior is par for the course.
“We’d be in our gowns and picking up tables and sweeping the floors . . . if there’s garbage on the floor,” Wolkoff tells The Post, “Anna does that, too.”
One former Vogue employee tells The Post that Wintour banned parsley from being served at the party “because you don’t want that stuck in your teeth.” Same goes for onion and garlic (bad breath) and appetizers like bruschetta (“It can fall easily on your gown,” says the source).
Glorious Food owner Sean Driscoll, who has catered every single Met Gala that Wintour has hosted, has become adept at handling the demands of the evening’s super-lithe, A-list clientele.
“It’s a well known fact that Stella McCartney is a vegan, so we have vegan food available for her table,” says Driscoll.
For the 2011 “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” gala, when Wintour served lamb potpie, he says they had “a lot of special requests.”
“Many [guests] didn’t want to eat that,” admits the caterer.
Unsurprisingly, for an aesthete like Wintour, it’s vital that the food look as good as it tastes.
Rossi recalls when Wintour and Baz Luhrmann, her friend and the event’s creative consultant, attended a tasting for last year’s China-themed Gala.
“They thought that the food didn’t look particularly sophisticated and they wanted it to look better,” says Rossi. “We see Anna literally going on her phone to look up the presentations of different food,” he says, adding that they ultimately ended up serving beef as a medallion, as opposed to sliced.
“The level of detail is shocking,” says Rossi.
Shocking, but expected for those who know Wintour. Durrett says she keeps records of past table arrangements for all Vogue events so as to not repeat any recent seating companions.
“A lot of thought goes into who sits next to who,” Durrett says in the film. She’s also heard on the phone pacifying someone about their clients’ fellow tablemates.
“We have Dave Franco. And who’s the other one you were saying? Josh Hartnett? What has he done lately? Nothing. You guys are all set. You have Kendall,” Durrett says in the doc.
“Anna does it like the head of state,” says Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley, who conducts red-carpet interviews at the event. “She wants it to be as near [as] possible [to] a perfect party. She wants to mix people up –—the dazzle glamour of Beyoncé next to Kim Kardashian next to Lady Gaga with Alexander Wang.”
Not everyone can sit next to Queen Bey, though.
“This is such a bad table. But someone’s got to take it,” concedes Durrett during one scene in the doc when she’s arranging seats just before the big event.
“[It has] no celeb, right?” asks Wintour.
“Chloë Sevigny and Solange Knowles,” Durrett responds.
We later see Sevigny looking notably disappointed by her seating assignment. “[It’s] just like high school,” says the former It girl.
Wolkoff says that when she was on the job, she would call guests with less desirable seats the day prior to give them a heads up. Wintour selflessly positioned herself in the back of the room and placed a few chosen Voguettes at various tables to ensure social fluidity.
“If [Vogue employees] were asked to sit, it was seen as really being invited as a guest of Vogue and someone very important to the industry,” says Wolkoff. “For Anna, it’s not just about a pretty face. It truly is about what you have to talk about and how you can hold a conversation and hold a table.”
And yes, cellphones are banned.
“Anna is sort of an old-school traditionalist. She likes a dinner party where people are actually speaking to each other,” explains Durrett who is in the throes of planning this year’s party. She explains that the staff subtly monitors phone usage. “We aren’t sitting over people’s shoulders, but if it’s an obvious thing we might gently remind them.”
Even the young Vogue employees who line the grand staircase of the Met to provide directions to guests and assist in the event that someone faints or needs a giant wine glass filled with scotch — a la Lady Gaga last year — are held to exacting standards.
“They were told very clearly that they weren’t allowed to be using their cellphones, and if they were seen using their cellphones they would be escorted out of the [ball],” recalls Rossi.
A former Vogue assistant tells The Post that a few weeks before the event, a rack of on-theme dresses are called in for the assistants and associates to choose from, although “people who have connections can call in better dresses.” Hair and makeup is provided for the underlings, too.
“It is an army,” says Durrett of the 100-person-deep Vogue, Met and event staff spearheading the Gala, including 10 full-time Vogue employees.
Raúl Àvila, who has been in charge of décor, design and flowers for the last 10 years, tells The Post he starts planning the party about 12 months before, meeting with Wintour and the museum representatives monthly, and doesn’t sleep for the three days leading up to the big night.
“There’s such a pressure,” says Àvila, who starts setting up his magical creations — like last year’s 30-foot-tall “porcelain” vase composed of 250,000 white and blue roses — four days before but must work within the Met’s 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. hours.
There’s a certain sort of expectation, standards of excellence that you learn as soon as you come to Vogue.
- Sylvana Durrett
“The level of intensity is very difficult and every year they step it up a level,” concurs Ted Resnick, whose company, Flemington Department Store, has provided carpeting for the event for the last decade. It takes him four days to complete the transformation.
“This year’s is larger than most — 72,000 square feet of carpeting,” he says, adding that “they always like a natural fiber.”
He recalls when Michelle Obama cut the ribbon to mark the official opening of the Costume Institute’s Anna Wintour Costume Center the morning of the Gala in 2014 and “the Secret Service wouldn’t even let us work outside the building. It was a close call,” he says. “In our business, failure isn’t an option.”
When one year the tablecloths Wolkoff ordered from China hadn’t arrived the week before the ball, she high-tailed it to Brooklyn and begged a favor from a local fabric guy she knew. In 2007, Wolkoff gave birth to her daughter via an emergency C-section on March 9 and barely paused to breathe.
“I was running up the steps of the Met two weeks later and opened up my stitch,” she recalls.
According to Durrett, the biggest drama is typically around the entertainment portion of the evening.
“There’s a lot of last-minute planning,” she says.
Last year, Durrett had to deal with Rihanna — the ball’s performer — demanding a performance budget twice as much as any past artist, a big money matter that was turned over to Wintour to handle. (No one interviewed would reveal how much Rihanna ended up costing.)
While Vogue wouldn’t confirm the performer at this year’s gala –— slated for May 2 with the theme “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” –— one thing is for certain: No matter what happens, Durrett will be ready to deal with it.
“We have binders with contacts for every possible human we would ever need to get in touch with on the day, just in case,” says the party-planning maestro, who keeps a calligrapher on-call for last-minute seating changes and a Mary Poppins bottomless bag full of Band-Aids, static spray, a sewing kit, backup chargers, energy bars and stain remover for emergencies.
“There’s a certain sort of expectation, standards of excellence that you learn as soon as you come to Vogue,” says Durrett.
Something that is no doubt appreciated by the guests lucky enough to be invited.
“It’s an honor to be a part of [it],” says Talley. “The Met Ball is the Super Bowl of social fashion events.”