"The First Monday in May" opens April 15 at the Bunkamura Le Cinema Theater in Tokyo's trendy Shibuya Ward (the Japanese title is "Metto Gara, Doresu o Matotta Bijutsukan"). It's a documentary about a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition titled "China: Through the Looking Glass" in 2015.
It was the most attended fashion history exhibition the Met had even seen with more than 800,000 visitors (breaking the 660,000 attendance record for Alexander McQueen's 2011 "Savage Beauty"). The reason? Apart from the gasp-inducing gorgeous frocks that represent China's cultural history, the celebrity wattage was blinding: Sarah Jessica Parker, Rihanna, Madonna, George Clooney and other A-listers paraded up the Met's red-carpeted staircase on the titular benefit night. And engineering the whole shebang was the "devil in Prada" herself, Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
Directed by Andrew Rossi, the film highlights the polite but intense struggle behind the scenes as Wintour and the Met's costume institute curator Andrew Bolton play a gentle tug of war to find just the right dramatic tones along with carving out a budget, and then orchestrating the whole thing for a Monday night in May. The question of whether fashion can be included in the ranks of traditional high art is at the core of their discussions.