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Although 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. Four years later, when Apple was a Met Gala sponsor, its chief govt, Tim Cook, confirmed up in tux and tails. And Instagram provided money in 2022.
The 2024 occasion is sponsored, partly, by TikTok, the social media goliath whose future appears to be like murkier than that of Condé Nast, the writer of Vogue, The New Yorker and different magazines, which has laid off staff 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 firm that owns TikTok, 9 months to dump the app or face a ban within the United States. In the wake of that political firestorm, Shou Chew, the 41-year-old chief govt of TikTok, is predicted to hitch dozens of superstar company on the Metropolitan Museum of Art 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} every year 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 superstar and vogue 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, Lady Gaga, Madonna) lately.
TikTok could also be loathed by Washington lawmakers who’ve raised issues concerning the Chinese authorities’s entry to its 170 hundreds of thousands customers within the United States, nevertheless it stays an plain cultural power in American life, particularly amongst Gen Z. The app can be a vogue power, and the Met Gala gives many TikTok creators with loads of fodder. That makes the little-known Mr. Chew at the least as highly effective because the far more recognizable co-chairs of this 12 months’s party — Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth and Ms. Wintour herself.
Along with TikTok, the posh vogue 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 thought to have kicked in roughly $5 million.
Mr. Bezos and Mr. Cook have been identified portions once they greeted the likes of Rihanna and Beyoncé at earlier Met Galas. Mr. Chew, alternatively, is more likely to go unrecognized by many of the gawkers who line up behind the barricades alongside Fifth Avenue, lots of whom could also be making TikTok movies on their telephones.
A Charm Offensive
Starting in 2022, when U.S. lawmakers have been turning up the warmth on TikTok, the corporate modified its public relations technique. Instead of holding 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 world leaders on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. At The New York Times’s DealBook convention in November 2022, he fielded questions on nationwide safety issues whereas carrying denims, an off-the-cuff blue blazer over a white T-shirt, and white sneakers that appeared recent out of the field.
His anticipated look on the Met Gala — as soon as a staid affair for New York blue bloods that has turn into an East Coast Oscars on Ms. Wintour’s watch — might be considered as a part of TikTok’s shift in the way it presents itself to the general public. But this time round, as a substitute of sitting down with those that have affect over issues of coverage, the TikTok chief might 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 is the place he has his major residence along with his spouse, Vivian Kao, 42, a onetime Goldman Sachs affiliate, and their three kids. In 2021, the couple spent greater than $60 million on a home within the Queen Astrid Park space of the island nation, based on The Business Times of Singapore.
The household is extremely non-public. A uncommon glimpse of Ms. Kao and one among their kids appeared in a video that Mr. Chew posted on TikTok from a current Taylor Swift live performance at Singapore National Stadium.
Mr. Chew has mentioned that his father labored in development and that his mom was a bookkeeper. After attending one among Singapore’s prime 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 University College 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 ground, and he was strolling previous,” Ms. du Preez recalled in a telephone interview.
In an early dialog, they discovered that they’d each utilized to Harvard Business School. They took coffee breaks collectively at Leonidas Chocolates across the nook from the workplace.
When 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 numerous college students looking out for fairly priced house décor objects.
“He’s come a great distance since then,” she mentioned.
Ms. du Preez and a number of other different Harvard Business School classmates interviewed for this text recalled Mr. Chew as somebody who was humorous, though they might not recall a particular humorous factor he had mentioned. They additionally agreed that he was razor-sharp, however provided no explicit examples of his acuity.
They described him as inquisitive about 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 turn into his spouse, Ms. Kao, once they have been each at Harvard Business School. A graduate of Wellesley College, she had grown up in Bethesda, Md., and is Taiwanese American.
Mr. Chew and Ms. Kao discovered themselves in enterprise faculty 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, mentioned in an interview.
Although 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 time internship at Facebook, relatively 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 alternative, based on 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 mentioned.
Master’s diploma in hand, he joined DST Global, a enterprise capital agency led by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who was on his method to changing into probably the most vital non-public traders in Silicon Valley corporations. Mr. Chew served as Mr. Milner’s level man in China, the place he helped lead investments in Alibaba and the Chinese ride-sharing service DiDi.
During 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 turn into ByteDance. Mr. Chew additionally helped with DST Global’s funding in Xiaomi, one among China’s largest telephone producers.
In 2013, Mr. Chew and Ms. Kao have been married. Two years later, Mr. Chew left DST to turn into the chief monetary officer of Xiaomi, which he helped take public in 2018.
He Got 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 stress placed on the corporate by the Trump administration due to its ties to China.
The opposition of U.S. lawmakers didn’t abate through 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.
Nowadays, Ms. Kao runs Tamarind Global, a household workplace that, based on 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, based on public information.
There has been debate about whether or not Mr. Chew — who travels with a small safety element — is the controlling power at TikTok. Company sources have instructed The Times that main strategic selections 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. But the account didn’t have a lot of a following till March 2023, when he was grilled by Congress.
Under 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 Communist Party and famous that his spouse is an American, telling his questioners, “By the way in which, she was simply born just a few miles away from right here.”
That was the looks that catapulted him into public consciousness. Before the listening to, he had fewer than 20,000 TikTok followers. He now has 3.9 million.
Users posted clips highlighting belligerent questions from lawmakers. Quite a few TikTokers even referred to as Mr. Chew “zaddy,” a slang time period that refers to an older, engaging man.
On Nov. 8, 2023, TikTok introduced that it could function “the lead sponsor” of this 12 months’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit, 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 mentioned within the interview. “My spouse and I are relearning the whole lot, like altering diapers.”
Along with different prime tech executives, Mr. Chew was referred to as earlier than Congress once more in January. He burdened that he didn’t dwell in China and mentioned he was not a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
While turning down interview requests from information organizations digging into TikTok’s Chinese 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 saved the concentrate on TikTok’s pop-culture footprint whereas seeming to defend it in opposition to its American critics by arguing that “a thinly veiled anti-Chinese xenophobia has turn 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 instructed Wired. “Fashion is an extremely vital a part of TikTok. Louis Vuitton has 12 million followers on our app.” (The designer now has greater than 13 million TikTok followers.)
Ms. du Preez, the Goldman Sachs colleague and Harvard classmate, mentioned she was not shocked that Mr. Chew could be eager about teaming up with Vogue and Ms. Wintour, significantly at a time when the corporate he leads is attempting to point out that it isn’t managed by China.
“The Met Gala is an extremely well-followed night,” she mentioned. “In phrases of constructing mates within the U.S., I believe it could make sense to do this, and everybody who’s going can have a TikTok account.”
Not that she anticipated him to select a memorable ensemble.
“I’ve little question Vivian will gown him in one thing stunning,” Ms. du Preez mentioned. “And at this level he can get a variety of recommendation from anybody about what to put on. I’m positive Anna Wintour can provide him ideas.”
For the document, 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.
