Costume Art: The Cast at The Mark

To me, a “Main Character Moment” isn't the spotlight. It's what's happening in the seconds around it, with everyone else still in the shot.

On May 4th, I spent the afternoon at The Mark Hotel. Where I photographed an array of talent, moments before they embarked on the most iconic red-carpeted steps in fashion: The Met Gala. 

The Mark lobby isn't a series of solo portraits, but a collection of moments in motion. Where people adjust each other's hems, wait on an elevator packed together, catch a friend's eye across a room, have a full conversation with someone whose look they'd only seen on a mood board a week earlier. 

While shooting, I kept thinking that this is exactly why Main Character Moments exist: to capture the quiet, the hectic, and the beautiful characters and their moments before the high res magnifying glass shines, fluorescently, onto them.

[Curator, Andrew Bolton’s] bold idea for “Costume Art” is to insist on the significance of the body, or ‘the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.’ Fashion, he insists, actually ‘has an edge on art because it is about one’s lived, embodied experience.’ 

Straying away from the clothes, the piece of art that hangs on the walls, or stands upright on a platform, Bolton’s focal lens on the human body and experience is what aligns this years’ Met Gala with Main Character Moments so perfectly. In fact one could almost describe my experience to capture this event as kismet. 

I had such a fabulous time and wonderfully excited to share these showstopping, glamorous Main Character Moments!

Our Main Character’s at The Mark

Imaan Hammam in Saint Laurent.

My favorite of the night! Imaan has spent a career knowing exactly what a garment is doing to her silhouette at any given second. She stood completely still, and with the utmost glamour, as she let the dress do all the moving. 

Paul Anthony Kelly in Dior by Johnathan Anderson.

We have spent the beginning of the year watching as he played JFK Jr. in Love Story (2026). Now within this burgundy velvet tailcoat and “old-Hollywood” look. There is a total mesh between the character we know him on-screen as with the up-and-coming actor experiencing his first Met Gala.

Adwoa Aboah in Simone Rocha.

The tenderest look in the room. Rocha's whole language is volume and tulle and that girlhood-with-teeth thing she does, and it landed on someone who has spent her career in front of cameras and still gives you something honest when you raise one.

Laura Harrier in Di Petsa and Alexa Chung in Dior.

Two completely different answers to the same brief. Di Petsa's wet-look drapery clings the way fabric does on a Greek marble — Laura read like the Classical Body wing had walked out of the museum and gotten into a car. Alexa went the opposite direction entirely: Dior structure, restraint, not a millimeter out of place. One dress surrendered to the body. The other built one.

Joe Burrow.

Its own kind of Costume Art footnote — an athlete, a body that is professionally a body, in a room where that had suddenly become the intellectual premise.

Here's what a red carpet can't show you.

The Mark lobby isn't a series of solo portraits. It's an ensemble in motion — people adjusting each other's hems, waiting on an elevator, catching a friend's eye across a room, having a full conversation with someone whose look they'd only seen on a mood board a week earlier. Everybody is in everybody else's frame.

That's the scene. That's the film. The carpet outside gives you a hundred main characters standing alone; the lobby gives you how they're connected.

And that's the thesis, in a sentence: a main character moment isn't the spotlight. It's what's happening in the seconds around it, with everyone else still in the shot.

Shot on Contax T3. Kodak UltraMax 400.