Costume Art: The Cast at The Mark

The Met Gala is the front stage. The Mark Hotel is the backstage.

On May 4th I spent the afternoon in that lobby, and the whole time I kept thinking that this is the exact thing Main Character Moments exists to do — take the moment that happens before everyone becomes an image, and give it the front stage instead.

This year's Costume Institute exhibition is Costume Art, curated by Andrew Bolton. The premise: put garments next to artworks from across the Met's collection and look at what the Gala usually rushes past — not how clothes photograph, but the fact that a body is inside them. Bolton organized it around the Naked Body, the Classical Body, the Pregnant Body, the Aging Body.

Which is to say the theme was about the person under the outfit. I have been trying to make that photograph for four years.

The Cast At The Mark

Imaan Hammam in Saint Laurent.

My favorite of the night. Saint Laurent doesn't decorate a body, it draws a line down one — and Imaan has spent a career knowing exactly what a garment is doing to her silhouette at any given second. She stood completely still in that lobby and let the dress do all the moving.

Paul Anthony Kelly.

He spent this year playing JFK Jr. in Ryan Murphy's Love Story, and there is something quietly disorienting about photographing a man who has been professionally inhabiting someone else's wardrobe — doing it in a hotel lobby a few blocks from where that entire mythology took place. Costume within costume.

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.