The Journal

Yoshitaka Amano is one of the most influential visual artists of the 20th century — a Japanese illustrator and painter who helped define the visual language of anime in the 1970s, who created the iconic character designs for the Final Fantasy video game series beginning in 1987, and whose fine art work has been exhibited internationally for decades. His imagery is immediately recognizable: fluid figures, layered color, a fantasy universe that exists between the human and the elemental. His hand is among the most distinctively legible in contemporary illustration.

The collaboration between a tailor and an artist is not obvious. Tailoring is a craft of precision and restraint — the suit that calls attention to itself is, by most definitions, failing at its job. Art, at its most interesting, calls attention to itself and to the ideas behind it. These two disciplines seem to pull in opposite directions.

A Vestium NY suit — designed and fitted at 315 Fifth Avenue, crafted by European master tailors — has been worn to board meetings in London, to gallery openings in Berlin, to a wedding in Capri, to a court hearing in Washington, to a dinner in Tokyo. The pattern stays in New York; the garment goes wherever the person who commissioned it goes. This is one of the specific pleasures of a well-made tailored piece — it belongs to the person, not to a place.

The Met Gala itself is an invitation-only event with a dress code calibrated to the year's exhibition theme — a context so specific and so curated that it has almost no practical application for the broader question of how to dress. The after-parties are different. They are more numerous, more accessible, and more genuinely useful as a reference for how to dress for New York's most fashion-forward formal social occasions.