Met Gala 2015 Inside the Party of the Year

It was not your average night at the museum. Some 600-odd guests a list as gilded and varied as to include Olsens Mary-Kate and Ashley, Henry Kissinger, George and Amal Clooney, Kelly Slater and Beyoncé wound their way through the red-carpet tumult tonight (louder and more boisterous than ever, spurred on, perhaps, by the unseasonably warm evening and the high concentration of star value present) and into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s entrance hall, dominated for tonight only by a gigantic chinoiserie vase created entirely by white and blue roses.

Up the grand staircase lined by fragrant, verdant bamboo they walked, past Vogue staffers clad in pale jade and lapis–toned Michael Kors pajamas, custom-made for the event; the biggest and boldest night on fashion’s calendar the Met Gala.

“It is about cultural interaction, the circuits of exchange through which certain images and objects have migrated across geographic boundaries. . . It points to the aesthetic importance of exploring all the products of our cultural fantasies,” read a plaque in one of the three floors of galleries taken over by “China: Through the Looking Glass“ some 30,000 square feet representing the past 300 years of Western fashion and several millennia of Chinese history, Andrew Bolton explained at the morning’s press conference the largest in the Met’s history, put on with the help of honorary chair Silas Chou and cochairs Jennifer Lawrence, Gong Li, Marissa Mayer, Wendi Murdoch, and Anna Wintour.