Superheroic.

As we put this issue together, my staff and I took a not insignificant amount of pleasure in poring over photographs of galagoers at the Met's Costume Institute Ball. May 5 was an exceptional night for fashion: I can't remember a time when so many guests were inspired to look as glamorous, original, and cool as they were to celebrate the opening of "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy." All of this preparation and drama is captured in Hamish Bowles's "A Hero's Welcome." Equally dazzling is the fact that through the generous and tireless efforts of Stephanie Winston Wolkoff ( VOGUE' s Director of Special Events), my cochairs--Giorgio Armani, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney--and the staffs of the magazine and the museum, we were able to raise $7.3 million for the Costume Institute in a single evening.

It is an honor for VOGUE to be able to make a contribution to the Metropolitan Museum, not least because of our great respect for the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello. If all goes according to plan, "Superheroes" will be Philippe's last Costume Institute exhibition, and the extraordinary privilege of collaborating with him is something that I will dearly miss.

The world of fashion owes, I believe, a particular debt of gratitude to Philippe. Alone among world-class museum directors, he has had the vision to acknowledge the role that style, self-presentation, and design play in Western culture, and has executed that vision in a way that has inspired millions to think of fashion as one of our most complex and rich decorative arts. In the Costume Institute's greatest shows during Philippe's tenure, he gave his curators the freedom to explore the connections between what we wear and how we live--"Dangerous Liaisons," "Poiret," "Jacqueline Kennedy," "AngloMania." These exhibitions succeeded in being both totally modern and directional while at the same time offering the sweeping historical perspective that is, of course, the signature of what his museum stands ...