If you’ve ever tried to create a seating chart for a wedding, you may have some idea of how difficult it can be to create a seating chart for the Met Gala. This is one of the most important aspects of the event where your team spends the most time, strategically seating guests with common interests in mind.
“There’s a lot of thought put into who sits next to whom, whether they sat together last year, whether they sat next to each other at other events, and it’s shocking,” Ward Durrett said on The First Monday in May. “There’s a lot of power brokering.”
Of course, seating arrangements change many times each year as the event takes shape, and Ward Durrett told Vogue that he learned early on to use Velcro on sticky notes to avoid mistakes. “The seating chart has been revised many times,” she says. “When I first started, we only had little sticky notes. It was a nightmare. Things were falling off, people were disappearing, and names were being rewritten a million times a day.”
Color coding is also used, as Ward Durrett prefers female, male, female, male patterns when possible. And another important rule that might surprise you: “Never let your spouse sit next to you,” she said. “The whole point of these activities is to meet new people and be interested in what other people are doing. If I’m here to play with my husband, what’s the point?” Sorry, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds!
