Anyone who has attempted to organize wedding seating knows how complicated a chart can become. Now imagine doing the same for the Met Gala, where the guest list is packed with celebrities, designers and influential figures. Planning the seating is one of the event team’s most demanding tasks, with guests strategically placed according to shared interests and connections.
“A lot of thought goes into who sits next to whom, whether they sat together the previous year and whether they’ve been seated together at other events,” Ward Durrett explained in The First Monday in May. “So much goes into it—it’s shocking. There’s a lot of power-brokering.”
The arrangement is revised repeatedly as the gala approaches. Durrett told Vogue that she quickly learned Velcro was far more reliable than Post-it notes when it came to keeping track of the ever-changing plan. “There have been many iterations of the seating chart,” she said. “When I first started, we used little sticky notes, and it was a nightmare—things kept falling off, people went missing and we were rewriting names a million times a day.”
The team also relies on color-coding, while Durrett aims for a woman-man-woman-man seating pattern whenever possible. There is another rule that may come as a surprise: “Never seat spouses next to each other,” she said. “The whole point of these events is to meet new people and be interested in what others are doing. What’s the point of coming if you’re just going to hang out with your husband?” Sorry, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds!