Last night’s Met Gala was an exhilarating celebration of Black excellence—and nowhere was that energy more prevalent than on the 12th floor of the luxurious Aman hotel in midtown, where Fear of God maestro Jerry Lorenzo assembled an Avengers-level group of Black talent to get dressed in his threads for the historic night.
Sleekly dressed assistants, photographers, and handlers hurried back and forth across a suite strewn with clothes, but the vibes remained overwhelmingly positive, upbeat, and supportive. In between photos, the veteran artist Arthur Jafa dapped NFL wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, who recently joined Jafa’s beloved Baltimore Ravens. “You guys gonna get one this year?” Jafa asked with a laugh.
“This is what I love doing man, coming out and supporting my friends,” Hopkins told me. “I’ve always been a big fan of Jerry even before we met, what he’s done for the culture, for young guys like myself, who are motivated by people of color who break through it and do things that not a lot of people have done before. And if you know a little bit about Jerry, man, his background, where he comes from, everything about him is legit and it’s hard not to get behind somebody like that.”
The evening represented a rare opportunity for Hopkins to let loose a little before locking back in for offseason training. “I’m looking forward to starting training with my QB, Lamar Jackson,” he said. “I understand where I am, I understand my age and all that, but I still feel like I got a lot of ball left. So I’m excited to go out and show the world.”
This being Hopkins’ first go-round at the Met, he said he was most intrigued to finally see what actually goes on inside the event once the carpet is wrapped. “I know a couple people who went, [but] they didn’t give any details. It was a secret, like you had to be there to know, so I guess I’ll keep that secret when somebody asks me what happened inside.”
Jafa admitted he wasn’t too pressed to attend his first Met Gala, but nevertheless couldn’t say no to a call from his longtime friend and supporter Lorenzo to be a part of this moment. “I’m really interested in fashion and aesthetics,” Jafa said, as he received a few last-minute fit touch-ups. “And I’m also very interested in the artists who are trying to tap into—I guess you could call it vernacular aesthetics, people might say ‘ghetto,’ they might say ‘street.’ You can say a lot of things, but I’m very interested in the transposition of those aesthetic values into what you would consider mainstream contexts.”
Jafa pinpointed this year’s theme as one signifier of a larger cultural wave that’s happening in fashion and entertainment right now. “I think there’s a unique desire [right now] to see what I would describe as Black Expressivity, sort of unconstrained and unmediated in a sense,” he said. “And I think this is because we really strike a chord with people.”