Vogue reveals employee once had to search through garbage to try to recover Met Gala invites

2023 Met Gala will take place on 1 May at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

Vogue staff have revealed that an employee was once tasked with digging through a garbage dump in the hopes of recovering invites to the Met Gala while reflecting on some of the major mishaps that have occurred during the planning for the annual party.

Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has helmed the Met Gala since 1995, with the magazine tasked with ensuring every moment of the biggest night in fashion goes off without a hitch.

However, despite the months of planning and preparation that go into the gala, everything isn’t always as perfect as it looks, according to Vogue staff, who revealed some of the problems they’ve encountered behind the scenes during the latest episode of the podcast The Run-Through with Vogue.

“I remember there was a very dramatic call, I can’t remember what year, regarding the invitations,” Vogue contributing editor Chloe Malle recalled, with one of her Vogue colleagues noting that it “must have been 2015 or 2016”.

“The invitation send-out is a very lengthy, involved process and takes the span of a few days. And over the course of a few days, we had not labelled them properly while we were storing them overnight. And they got thrown away,” Malle continued of the invitations, which are “extremely expensive” and “take weeks to produce”.

“Beautiful, printed letterpress, they’re all in cardboard boxes that were mistaken for trash by housekeeping,” Vogue special projects and events consultant Eaddy Kiernan Bunzel recalled.

Malle then revealed that, in an effort to remedy the situation, they’d sent a team member to the garbage dump in the hopes of finding the invites.

“And, to be fair, we had not labelled them properly. And we ended up having to send someone to the New York City town dump to try and, you know, dig through,” she said.

According to Bunzel, the employee had been a “very good sport” about the task, which required her to take the ferry to Staten Island.

However, the attempt at recovering the invitations was ultimately unsuccessful.

“It was a young woman named Lindsay and she was a very good sport … She took the ferry to Staten Island to the dump and had to stand with a hard hat looking into the dump saying, ‘where are my invitations?’” she remembered, adding: “And guess what, we were not successful.”

The Vogue employees said the dilemma has stuck with them and that they are “reminded” of the story each year when it comes time to mail out the highly coveted invites for the Met Gala.

During the podcast, they also reflected on the call they’d received about Katy Perry’s dress shortly before the 2019 Met Gala, as there had been concern the bejeweled chandelier Moschino dress would not fit through the doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To ensure Perry could wear the outfit for the theme: Camp: Notes on Fashion, staff had to make a last-minute trip to the museum to measure the doors.

Fortunately, the outlet said that it has yet to receive a panicked call ahead of this year’s event.

The 2023 Met Gala will take place on 1 May and celebrate the opening of the Costume Institute exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”.