Stanley Tucci returned to the Met Gala on April 6, ending a 20-year absence from the event with a hunter green velvet tuxedo by Etro and a Breitling Premier B01 Chronograph 42 watch. Felicity Tucci wore a black smoking suit with a wool jacquard embroidered jacket from Etro beside him.
The return mattered because Tucci was not walking into the party alone in spirit. The Devil Wears Prada 2 cast is featured prominently at the Met Gala this year, and set photos from last summer already showed Tucci alongside Meryl Streep and Simone Ashley with the gala serving as part of the film backdrop. His appearance linked a fashion-world fixture to a movie franchise that has long treated that world as its native language.
Tucci, who last appeared at the Met Gala in 2006, said the clothes fit the way he thinks about performance. “I always think that acting is like you’re taking bits and pieces of your personality and you’re heightening them,” he said. “So you’re taking the part of me that loves fashion and is a bit of a peacock, the quippy parts, and amping it up a bit.” He added that the trick is to keep the performance grounded: “Then you just make sure it remains real and true and that it always has a center, that it has a core, that it has a heart. Otherwise it’s just a pastiche.”
The Met Gala moment also fed into Tucci’s other project. He said he came up with the idea for Tucci in Italy about 20 years ago because he knew there was an extraordinary range of food and culture in Italy, but rarely saw that variety reflected in cooking shows. He said those programs too often circled the same landmarks and stereotypes, while his own series aimed to show the diversity of people, topography and politics through food. Tucci in Italy is set to premiere on May 11.
That makes his Met Gala return more than a cameo. It is a reminder that Tucci has become one of the rare public figures who can move between film, fashion and food without losing the center he described himself.
