Sarah Jessica Parker hasn't been to the Met since 2018, and she has been missed. She commissioned Christopher John Rogers to make a look based on Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a woman born into slavery who bought her way out of it by becoming a successful Gilded Age seamstress and designer, most renowned for dressing Mary Todd Lincoln. She is also one of the first Black women to publish a book (albeit a depressingly long time after Phyllis Wheatley's). Definitely click that link, read all about her, and start fantasy-casting the Netflix show that absolutely ought to be made. Nobody else that I've yet seen wore Christopher John Rogers on this night, which is a bummer, but maybe this undertaking is why. Worth it.
Herein, an assortment of American-based designers that we've put together to cover the ones that didn't have a whole big entourage. First up: Rogers, Joseph Altuzarra, LaQuan Smith, Vera Wang, and Tory Burch.