The Face of the Met Gala
The Face of the Met Gala
e’d just finished putting the last of the stuff from his dorm in the car when the phone rang. Standing outside the Piedmont Central residence hall on a spring Friday afternoon, Christian Latchman’s agent was on the line with some news.
“I was just going, ‘Oh, my god,’” Latchman says. “I think I started crying.”
Latchman was going to the Met Gala, the signature fundraiser of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the event known in the industry and elsewhere as “fashion’s biggest night out.”
It might have been an unlikely invitation to be extended to a first-year biology major at an urban research university in Atlanta working two jobs with plans of going to medical school to become an anesthesiologist.
But Latchman had already made his presence known in New York’s fashion industry. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d dropped everything to race to the airport for a flight to the Big Apple to walk among the elite of fashion, photography and modeling. But, given he’d only really started pursuing work as a model the previous November, it would be only his second time doing so.
And, as it turns out, his image being chosen for the cover photo of the Costume Institute’s 2025 exhibition catalog — effectively making him the “face of the Met Gala” — was a pretty good way to get an invitation.
Working 9-5
A New York native of Jamaican ancestry, Latchman moved to Georgia at 14. When it was time to pick a college, he toured Georgia State University’s downtown Atlanta Campus and liked what he saw. He enrolled at the start of the fall 2024 semester.
“It felt really inclusive,” he says. “And after being here a year, I like it even more. I feel like everybody is here for a reason and that’s very inspiring. It’s great to be around ambitious, goal-driven people.”
While living on campus and working two part-time jobs — at Kroger and GNC, the supplement and nutrition retailer — Latchman took to heart all the times he'd been told in passing by friends and acquaintances, “You should model,” and, “You look like a model.”
In November 2024, he joined Infinite Appeal, a student group for those with an interest in fashion and community service who aspire to walk the runway. It was a pivotal decision.
“Without that club, I wouldn’t have got to where I am,” Latchman says.
That’s because through Infinite Appeal, Latchman met his eventual Atlanta-based agent, Ursula Wiedmann, who visited the club as a guest speaker while also scouting for new talent. Wiedmann, however, was not immediately struck by Latchman and passed on him.
A few weeks later, undeterred, Latchman went to an open casting session at Wiedmann’s offices. Strike two.
Before the fall semester wrapped up for the long winter break, Latchman fired off a series of cold emails to every modeling agency he could think of, including Wiedmann’s, hoping to catch someone’s eye. The persistence paid off and, soon, Wiedmann signed him and began pitching his talents to larger agencies. By the first week of January, he was signed to Next Management in New York.
The second week of January, as Latchman drove to work, he got that first call to drop what he was doing and head to the airport. A flight was booked. He’d landed a job.
En Vogue
Having just signed with a New York modeling agency, Latchman was pretty sure if got the call to jet off for a job, it’d be worth his while. He wasn’t, as it turns out, exactly sure what the job was, though.
After arriving at the Metropolitan Museum one cold New York January day when it was closed to the public, Latchman found where he was supposed to be and waited. He soon recognized some famous faces flitting by:
Tyler Mitchell, the Brooklyn-based photographer and filmmaker raised in Atlanta and known for his work for Gucci, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Anna Wintour, the British-born fashion icon and U.S. Vogue editor-in-chief who co-chairs the Met Gala.
Before long, an assistant approached Latchman
“Do you know what you’re doing today?”
“No,” Latchman replied. “No one told me.”
“That sounds about right,” the assistant said.
Latchman was soon told he would be dressed and photographed for the Costume Institute’s exhibition catalog, and his shots would be among those in the running for the cover.
After an hours-long shoot with Mitchell, Latchman was on his way back to Atlanta figuring if he wound up being chosen, someone would let him know. Not a bad start to a modeling career barely two months old, he figured.
Back in Atlanta, Latchman kept himself busy with work and school, a courseload of online classes he registered for hoping it’d give him the flexibility to take any more modeling jobs that might come his way during the spring semester. But none did.
“Months go by, and at the end of April I started getting tagged [on social media], and I looked and it was my picture, and it was in The New York Times!” Latchman says.
Soon, his picture was everywhere. It had, indeed, been chosen for the cover of the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition catalog. The 2025 Met Gala would celebrate the opening of the exhibit, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” an exploration of the dandyism the museum says sprung from African and European style traditions. And Latchman, with a pencil-thin mustache and neatly cropped and parted hair, sternly staring back from the catalog, would be its cover model.
“The picture was going viral, but I wasn’t going viral,” Latchman says, noting his own social media profile didn’t seem to be attracting attention. That is, until he posted a TikTok juxtaposing his cover photo with the more mundane realities of being a 19-year-old college student. The video, captioned “Literally the face of the MET GALA this year but still gotta clock in to my 9-5” has gotten over 100,000 likes and earned him thousands of new followers.
Soon, media began reaching out to interview him.
Then, while moving out of Piedmont Central for the summer, he got the call to fly back to New York for the gala.
Making a STATEment
“My biggest fear was that nobody would know me, but I was proven wrong,” Latchman says.
Over the weekend that preceded the May 5 gala, co-chaired by Wintour, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky and Pharrell Williams (with basketball’s LeBron James picking up honorary co-chair duties), Latchman experienced a whirlwind of New York’s fashion culture in the run-up to its big night. There were interviews. Fittings. Photo sessions.
He was given six options for his red-carpet style.
“Being in the Vogue headquarters, getting dressed, was insane,” he says.
The striking white suit he chose, with its wide lapels and oversized white train, was called “5000” by Taylor Thompson. Shoes by Ferragamo. Bernard James jewelry.
“I felt like with it being my first Met Gala, I wanted to make a statement,” Latchman says.
And a statement he made.
His red-carpet look was captured and published widely, in outlets from CNN to Time to Cosmopolitan. Esquire named him one of “our picks for the best-dressed guys from fashion’s big night.”
So what’s next for the “face of the Met Gala?”
Back home in Atlanta, Latchman registered for fall courses, like any rising sophomore does. But while the only modeling job he’d booked before the Met Gala was that January cover shoot, his calendar is now quickly filling.
Soon Latchman will be off to France in preparation for Paris Fashion Week at the end of June. There’ll be castings. Fittings. Catwalks.
It’ll be Italy, after that.
He says he’s even in talks with brass at GNC, that part-time job where he shot that fateful TikTok, for a photo shoot.
“The modeling is working out,” Latchman says, half-joking and seemingly half-surprised. “So we’re gonna see where it goes.”
Top photo by Shawncvisions
