Met Gala maestro Andrew Bolton talks taste
The head curator of The Met’s Costume Institute loves dachshunds, The Vicar of Dibley and Villa d’Este
My personal style signifiers are pretty casual and consistent: my tortoiseshell glasses – I’ve worn various brands over the past 20 years – and a navy cashmere four-bar cardigan, chino trousers, white cotton Oxford shirts, a rep tie and classic wingtip brogues, all by my partner Thom Browne. The last thing I bought and loved was a painting by Ewa Juszkiewicz, the Surrealist Polish artist. She recreates paintings from the renaissance to the 19th century, but obscures their faces with fabrics or phantasmagoric wigs. Ours references the 17th-century portrait of Maria van Strijp by Dutch golden age artist Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck, which belongs to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. We’d been looking for one of her paintings for a long time and were lucky to get it in a Sotheby’s evening auction.
The work of art that changed everything for me is Francis Bacon’s “screaming Pope”, after Diego Velázquez’s 17th-century Portrait of Pope Innocent X. It’s such a depiction of postwar existential angst and I tend to gravitate toward artists who reinterpret history in different ways. The best book I’ve read in the past year is Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, a social comedy about gay life in England from the 1960s to the pandemic. I’ve always loved his operatic writing style. It’s told through his lived experience, and I think it resonated with me because I was also reading Monica Miller’s Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity at the same time. Both examine issues of race, gender and sexuality and are rooted in history, and Miller’s book inspired our upcoming exhibition at The Met.
The place that means a lot to me is Villa d’Este in Lake Como. It was the first place Thom and I went on holiday together and we still go two or three times a year. It’s become a home from home. We tend to go right after the Met Gala in May, after the fashion shows in Milan and for three weeks at the end of August. Lake Como has such a microclimate: one day it’s sunny, one day it’s hailing, one day it’s snowy, so it’s a very biblical place in terms of the weather. We used to explore the lake more, but now we just stay put and catch up on reading.