If you’ve ever tried to do seating arrangements for a wedding, you might have a tiny understanding of just how difficult it is to do the seating chart for the Met Gala. This is one of the most important aspects of the event that the team spends the most time on, strategically seating guests by looking at common interests.
“A lot of thought goes into who sits next to who, if they sat together last year, if they’ve sat next to each other at other events, so much goes into it, it’s shocking,” Ward Durrett said in The First Monday in May. “A lot of power-brokering.”
Of course, each year the seating arrangements go through many, many changes as the event takes shape, with Ward Durett telling Vogue she learned early on to invest in Velcro over post-it notes to avoid any errors. “There have been many iterations of the seating chart,” she said. “When I first started, we had just little stickies, and it was a nightmare—things were falling off, we were losing people and rewriting names a million times a day.”
Color-coding is also used, as Ward Durrett likes to go with the woman-man-woman-man pattern if possible. And another key rule that might surprise you: “Never seat spouses next to each other,” she said. “The whole point of these things is to meet new people, and to be interested in what others are doing. What’s the point if you come here to hang out with your husband?” Sorry, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds!