Though the Met Gala serves as a branding occasion for Vogue, it has lengthy accepted sponsorships from the tech giants which have threatened the very survival of legacy media publications.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, appeared because the ball’s honorary chair in 2012. 4 years later, when Apple was a Met Gala sponsor, its chief govt, Tim Prepare dinner, confirmed up in tux and tails. And Instagram provided money in 2022.
The 2024 occasion is sponsored, partially, by TikTok, the social media goliath whose future seems to be murkier than that of Condé Nast, the writer of Vogue, The New Yorker and different magazines, which has laid off workers and shuttered or bought off a few of its publications lately.
TikTok discovered itself in jeopardy final month, when President Biden signed a invoice that gave ByteDance, the Chinese language firm that owns TikTok, 9 months to dump the app or face a ban in the USA. Within the wake of that political firestorm, Shou Chew, the 41-year-old chief govt of TikTok, is anticipated to hitch dozens of celeb friends on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in Manhattan on Monday night.
He was chosen by Anna Wintour as an honorary chair for the profit, which raises tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} annually for the museum’s Costume Institute. Ms. Wintour, the worldwide editorial director of Condé Nast and the editor in chief of Vogue, has run the occasion for 1 / 4 of a century, utilizing her sense of celeb and trend synergy to create a splashy showcase of a number of the world’s most influential folks, a gaggle that has come to incorporate extra social media influencers and fewer one-name stars (Beyoncé, Girl Gaga, Madonna) lately.
TikTok could also be loathed by Washington lawmakers who’ve raised issues concerning the Chinese language authorities’s entry to its 170 hundreds of thousands customers in the USA, however it stays an plain cultural pressure in American life, particularly amongst Gen Z. The app can also be a trend pressure, and the Met Gala supplies many TikTok creators with loads of fodder. That makes the little-known Mr. Chew at the least as highly effective because the way more recognizable co-chairs of this 12 months’s social gathering — Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Unhealthy Bunny, Chris Hemsworth and Ms. Wintour herself.
Together with TikTok, the luxurious trend model Loewe is a sponsor; its inventive director, Jonathan Anderson, will serve alongside Mr. Chew as an honorary chair.
TikTok declined to disclose its monetary contribution to the star-studded occasion. In earlier years, a sponsor is understood to have kicked in roughly $5 million.
Mr. Bezos and Mr. Prepare dinner have been recognized portions after they greeted the likes of Rihanna and Beyoncé at earlier Met Galas. Mr. Chew, however, is prone to go unrecognized by many of the gawkers who line up behind the barricades alongside Fifth Avenue, a lot of whom could also be making TikTok movies on their telephones.
A Attraction Offensive
Beginning in 2022, when U.S. lawmakers have been turning up the warmth on TikTok, the corporate modified its public relations technique. As an alternative of maintaining a low profile, it launched into a attraction offensive, with the fresh-faced Shou (pronounced “present”) Chew entrance and middle.
As TikTok plowed hundreds of thousands into its lobbying efforts, Mr. Chew met with the heads of assume tanks in Washington and international leaders on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland. At The New York Instances’s DealBook convention in November 2022, he fielded questions on nationwide safety issues whereas sporting denims, an off-the-cuff blue blazer over a white T-shirt, and white sneakers that seemed contemporary out of the field.
His anticipated look on the Met Gala — as soon as a staid affair for New York blue bloods that has change into an East Coast Oscars on Ms. Wintour’s watch — could be seen as a part of TikTok’s shift in the way it presents itself to the general public. However this time round, as a substitute of sitting down with those that have affect over issues of coverage, the TikTok chief shall be standing on a crimson carpet earlier than a squadron of photographers.
Mr. Chew, who declined via a TikTok consultant to be interviewed for this text, grew up in Singapore. That’s the place he has his major residence together with his spouse, Vivian Kao, 42, a onetime Goldman Sachs affiliate, and their three youngsters. In 2021, the couple spent greater than $60 million on a home within the Queen Astrid Park space of the island nation, in line with The Enterprise Instances of Singapore.
The household is extremely non-public. A uncommon glimpse of Ms. Kao and certainly one of their youngsters appeared in a video that Mr. Chew posted on TikTok from a current Taylor Swift live performance at Singapore Nationwide Stadium.
Mr. Chew has stated that his father labored in development and that his mom was a bookkeeper. After attending certainly one of Singapore’s high secondary faculties, he accomplished two years of obligatory nationwide service within the Singapore Armed Forces, the place he was an officer. From there, he enrolled at College Faculty London.
After graduating in 2006 with a level in economics, he took a job within the London workplace of Goldman Sachs. That was the place he met Nathalie du Preez, who stays a pal of his.
“We sat on the identical flooring, and he was strolling previous,” Ms. du Preez recalled in a cellphone interview.
In an early dialog, they discovered that they’d each utilized to Harvard Enterprise Faculty. They took espresso breaks collectively at Leonidas Goodies across the nook from the workplace.
After they arrived at Harvard within the fall of 2008, Ms. du Preez and Mr. Chew shared a journey with a gaggle of individuals certain for Ikea. They have been simply two of the various college students looking out for fairly priced dwelling décor objects.
“He’s come a good distance since then,” she stated.
Ms. du Preez and a number of other different Harvard Enterprise Faculty classmates interviewed for this text recalled Mr. Chew as somebody who was humorous, though they may not recall a selected humorous factor he had stated. Additionally they agreed that he was razor-sharp, however supplied no specific examples of his acuity.
They described him as interested in popular culture and sports activities, saying he was a fan of Manchester United and recalling that he had attended a David Guetta present on the Roxy in Boston. They talked about that he preferred video video games, together with the soccer recreation FIFA, and famous that he was the tidiest of his roommates.
Mr. Chew met the lady who would change into his spouse, Ms. Kao, after they have been each at Harvard Enterprise Faculty. A graduate of Wellesley Faculty, she had grown up in Bethesda, Md., and is Taiwanese American.
Mr. Chew and Ms. Kao discovered themselves in enterprise college because the monetary disaster arrived. “We referred to as it the ‘simply in time’ admissions class, as a result of the markets crashed that fall,” Caren Kelleher, a fellow classmate, stated in an interview.
Though it was a time when massive banks have been failing, a few of Mr. Chew’s fellow enterprise college students have been shocked when he took a summer season internship at Fb, somewhat than going into finance. The social media firm was solely 5 years previous and years away from going public.
His classmates later realized he had made a prescient selection, in line with Jean Abillama, who lived throughout the road from Mr. Chew in Cambridge, Mass. “He was seeing this massive wave of tech and e-commerce, the tech wave coming to mild,” she stated.
Grasp’s diploma in hand, he joined DST International, a enterprise capital agency led by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who was on his strategy to turning into probably the most vital non-public buyers in Silicon Valley firms. Mr. Chew served as Mr. Milner’s level man in China, the place he helped lead investments in Alibaba and the Chinese language ride-sharing service DiDi.
Throughout that point, Mr. Milner supplied a reported $10 million in financing to a news-aggregation app based by the entrepreneur Zhang Yiming, who developed a rapport with Mr. Chew. The app would change into ByteDance. Mr. Chew additionally helped with DST International’s funding in Xiaomi, certainly one of China’s largest cellphone producers.
In 2013, Mr. Chew and Ms. Kao have been married. Two years later, Mr. Chew left DST to change into the chief monetary officer of Xiaomi, which he helped take public in 2018.
He Acquired the Job
Mr. Chew was named the chief monetary officer of ByteDance in March 2021. He ascended to the highest TikTok job two months later. In November of that 12 months, he stepped down as ByteDance’s chief monetary officer.
TikTok’s earlier chief govt, Kevin Mayer, had resigned after lower than 4 months on the job, citing the rising strain placed on the corporate by the Trump administration due to its ties to China.
The opposition of U.S. lawmakers didn’t abate throughout the presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr. As Mr. Chew labored to maintain lawmakers at bay, he discovered time to attend the 2022 Met Gala with Ms. Kao. He went all-out formal, in conventional white tie and tails; she wore a resplendent floral-patterned robe.
These days, Ms. Kao runs Tamarind International, a household workplace that, in line with its web site, “manages investments and philanthropy” for a “Singaporean household.” Its shareholders embrace Mr. Chew and a belief linked to Mr. Chew and Ms. Kao, in line with public information.
There was debate about whether or not Mr. Chew — who travels with a small safety element — is the controlling pressure at TikTok. Firm sources have advised The Instances that main strategic choices have been dealt with by Mr. Yiming, amongst others.
Mr. Chew displayed a way of enjoyable in his TikTok deal with — @shou.time — which riffs on the pronunciation of his first identify. However the account didn’t have a lot of a following till March 2023, when he was grilled by Congress.
Underneath aggressive questioning, Mr. Chew was made to repeat that he was a citizen of Singapore, not China. He went on to emphasize that TikTok was not managed by the Chinese language Communist Get together and famous that his spouse is an American, telling his questioners, “By the best way, she was simply born a couple of miles away from right here.”
That was the looks that catapulted him into public consciousness. Earlier than the listening to, he had fewer than 20,000 TikTok followers. He now has 3.9 million.
Customers posted clips highlighting belligerent questions from lawmakers. Quite a lot of TikTokers even referred to as Mr. Chew “zaddy,” a slang time period that refers to an older, enticing man.
On Nov. 8, 2023, TikTok introduced that it might function “the lead sponsor” of this 12 months’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork Costume Institute Profit, the formal identify of the Met Gala. Days after the announcement, Vogue Singapore revealed a uncommon sit-down interview with Mr. Chew.
He was photographed in Louis Vuitton denims and a velvet Brunello Cucinelli blazer, and he spoke benignly about his obligatory service in Singapore’s armed forces in “the jungles of Brunei” and doing diaper responsibility for a 3rd time. “There’s fairly an age hole between this child and the earlier child,” he stated within the interview. “My spouse and I are relearning every thing, like altering diapers.”
Together with different high tech executives, Mr. Chew was referred to as earlier than Congress once more in January. He burdened that he didn’t stay in China and stated he was not a member of the Chinese language Communist Get together.
Whereas turning down interview requests from information organizations digging into TikTok’s Chinese language ties, Mr. Chew gave an interview to a different Condé Nast publication, Wired, throughout a TikTok music pageant in Mesa, Ariz., in December 2023.
The Wired article largely stored the deal with TikTok’s pop-culture footprint whereas seeming to defend it in opposition to its American critics by arguing that “a thinly veiled anti-Chinese language xenophobia has change into a dependable a part of the U.S. political playbook.” It additionally included an advance plug for Mr. Chew’s look on the Met Gala.
“It’s very cultural,” Mr. Chew advised Wired. “Style is an extremely vital a part of TikTok. Louis Vuitton has 12 million followers on our app.” (The style home now has greater than 13 million TikTok followers.)
Ms. du Preez, the Goldman Sachs colleague and Harvard classmate, stated she was not shocked that Mr. Chew can be occupied with teaming up with Vogue and Ms. Wintour, notably at a time when the corporate he leads is making an attempt to point out that it isn’t managed by China.
“The Met Gala is an extremely well-followed night,” she stated. “When it comes to making buddies within the U.S., I feel it might make sense to do this, and everybody who’s going could have a TikTok account.”
Not that she anticipated him to pick a memorable ensemble.
“I’ve little doubt Vivian will gown him in one thing stunning,” Ms. du Preez stated. “And at this level he can get numerous recommendation from anybody about what to put on. I’m positive Anna Wintour can provide him ideas.”
For the file, Mr. Chew is slated to put on one thing from Ralph Lauren, the American designer whose fondness for crimson, white and blue has made him a pure option to outfit U.S. Olympics groups in patriotic garb.
Ryan Mac contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.
