Ava DuVernay’s Met Gala Dress Was Inspired by a 100-Year-Old Family Photo

When Ava DuVernay, the award-winning director of Selma and A Wrinkle in Time, first heard about this year's Met Gala theme, she was at a Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales event in Paris with the Prada team. “I was shocked. I was very surprised,” she said of hearing about the Black dandy theme of the exhibit. “And [my second thought] was, 'Oh no, what are people going to do?' But then I started to think. My mind immediately went to my great grandmother, and I got really excited when I saw the chairs. Coleman Domingo is a close, brother-like friend of mine and an actual dandy I know in my regular life.”

ava duvernay

The timing was fortuitous; then and there, she and the Prada team decided to partner on a look for the event. DuVernay has a longstanding relationship with the brand: “They have embraced me so warmly over the years. It's been over a decade now,” she told Bazaar. “I feel like fashion is cinematic. It's art, it's storytelling, but it's a real familial connection. I had an idea pretty quickly, my great-grandmother came to mind, and it seemed to fit [the theme] well. So I asked Prada, 'Well, make this fancy!'”

a woman wearing a stylish outfit adjusts a hat

Her approach to this year’s Met Gala look began with a photo of her great-grandmother, Annie Fisher, in 1919, dressed in a white shirt and striped, black-and-white high-waisted skirt and wide-brimmed hat. “She was a seamstress and a tailor for the entertainment industry, in particular for an actress named Esther Williams who's known for being swimmer and an actress. She did black-and-white movies where they were doing synchronized swimming, or she would dive off a diving board,” DuVernay explained from her New York hotel room just days before the Met. “[My great-grandmother] lived in the Central Avenue area of Los Angeles, which is a famous historic Black district in Los Angeles, thriving with arts. She moved there from Texas and that’s where we believe the picture was taken. I like it because it shows her before she became kind of city-fied. She looks like a country girl who is trying to dress up. She doesn't have some of the things that I see her in later pictures, like fur coats and hats. That hadn't happened yet.”

ava duvernay's grandmother

For her modern interpretation of her great-grandmother's look, DuVernay worked with her stylist Katie Bofshever on a white silk duchesse corset top with pleated sleeve detail, a black satin skirt with crystal embroidery, silver pumps, and a silver leather clutch that paid homage to the clean lines of her great-grandmother’s original outfit while elevating the look through fabrication and embellishment. Her beauty look saw her signature locs pulled back into a tight pony, with a pillar box red lip courtesy of her makeup and hair artist (yes, she pulled double duty), India Hammond. “She's very new on the scene. She's extraordinary. The intimacy of working with one person, and someone I've worked with really closely over the past couple of years, is really special.”

A multi-time attendee, DuVernay knows her way around the Met. Asked what the view from inside is like, she says, “It's similar to the Oscars. It's a closed room, and it takes certain merit to be in there. It's one of those rooms where every place your eye turns, it's somebody you know. Folks are just excited to talk and be real people and hug and ask questions and be a little less guarded, because there are no cameras. Everybody's worked so hard for the carpet moment that as soon as you get up those stairs and turn the corner, everyone lets loose. You kick off your heels, unhook your dress. You will not see more bare feet than at the Oscars!”

DuVernay laughed before concluding, “For a lot of people, it's their thing. It's a lot of reverence and they've worked really hard to get there. For me, I've been lucky and I'm happy to join the party!”