Countdown To Anna Wintour's Met Gala Collides With Obama East Side Fundraiser

Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and US President Barack ObamaFashion, money, power and politicos will converge tonight on the Upper East Side of Manhattan as Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour holds court at the annual spring Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a major recipient of Wintour’s Democratic and sometimes Republican fundraising network arrives on the Upper East Side for a Presidential.

President Obama Didn’t Check His Patron’s Anna’s Schedule

President Obama is in New York to film a segment for ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ in midtown at 4:20 pm and two Democratic National Committee fundraising events at 6:15pm and 8:15 pm. President Obama is scheduled to leave JFK airport on Air Force One at 10pm, so leaving the Met Gala will just be the ordinary traffic challenge.

Arriving at the Met Gala could be a big headache, however. A political fundraiser hosted by Loida Nicolas-Lewis — widow of the late Baltimore billionaire entrepreneur Reginald Lewis is steps away from the The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anna Wintour’s Big Party

5 Facts about tonight’s Met Gala:

1) More than 500 Oscar-winning actors, ‘Wall Street titans, Silicon Valley wunderkinds, fashion designs and Hollywood players will attend’, writes the NYTimes Style section.

2) Last year the single evening generated almost $12 million to support the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Met.

3) Last year’s event generated 25 million page views on Vogue.com.

4) Filmmaker Andrew Rossi will be filming a documentary this year. Relativity Studios is partnering with Conde Nast Entertainment and Vogue to capture the planning and making of the exhibit and tonight’s gala — and the big event itself.

5) Since taking over the gala in 1999, Anna Wintour has raised in excess of $145 million for the Costume Institute.

Vogue Pajama Party

Page Six reports that top models, Mario Testino, Alexander Wang and Will.i.am attended a Vogue Pajama Party on Saturday night, in advance of tonight’s Met Gala. Models at the Nom Wah Tea Parlor bash included Bella Hadid, Constance Jablonski, Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Baldwin, Alexa Chung, and Chloe Sevigny. See more Pajama Party snaps on Vogue.com

Nom Wah Tea Parlor

Located at 13 Doyers Street in New York’s Chinadown, Vogue.com writes about Nom Wah Tea Parlor :

Recently renovated, this quintessential Chinatown parlor claims to have been the first and features a dazzling array of authentic, made-to-order dim sum at bargain rates. Nom Wah is famous for its homemade lotus paste and red bean filling for its moon cake during the Moon Festival, otherwise known as Mid-Autumn Festival. Thanks to the online food delivery service, Caviar, you can even have some of the city’s best rice rolls delivered to your home.

China’s Fashion Influence

‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ opening tonight May 4, 2015 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art  see Met website

Curated and organized by Andrew Bolton with production design by Nathan Crowley, ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ will spill beyond the the Costume Center and into the grand backdrop of the museum’s Chinese Galleries. In a first for contemporary fashion, the show juxtaposes rare artifacts, masterpieces of Chinese art and Chinese cinema with mostly Western designers like Poiret and Yves Saint Laurent who have been inspired by Chinese culture.

There’s a visceral pleasure in discovering, in the same gallery, a cobalt dragon wriggling across the swelling forms of both an exquisite fifteenth-century Ming storage jar and a strapless blue-and-white silk-satin evening dress by Roberto Cavalli. “At the Met, we can put modern art into a 5,000-year context,” says Maxwell K. Hearn, head of the museum’s Department of Asian Art, which collaborated with Bolton and the Costume Institute on the show, underwritten by Yahoo. “That’s one of the thrills for me.”