In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received a special delivery: 57 rolls of pristine white carpet, each stretching nearly 100 feet long. Stored securely until around 3 a.m. on the first Monday in May, the precious fabric will be unfurled down the museum’s iconic Fifth Avenue steps and meticulously hand-painted by a team of artists, transforming it into the stage for hundreds of VIPs who will strut, sashay, and smize their way into the Met Gala later that evening.
The man behind those 73,625 square feet of magic carpet is 35-year-old Sivan Santhosh, co-owner of Neytt by Extraweave, based in Kerala, India. He started the company with his wife, Nimisha Srinivas, in 2021 continuing a family legacy of carpet weaving that stretches back more than a century. Neytt has manufactured the Met Gala’s red carpet for the 2022, 2023 and 2025 ceremonies — as well as this year’s event, taking place Monday.
Santhosh’s carpets have seen it all: Kim Kardashian in Marilyn Monroe’s iconic “Mr President” gown; Doja Cat in cosplay as Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette; and two Rihanna pregnancy bump reveals. It’s the stage for some of fashion’s most talked-about moments.
Only after months of creating the first carpet was it revealed to Santhosh and Srinivas that the NDA-shrouded event they had been working on was none other than the Met Gala.
“We started with the initial prototyping and development, but we didn’t know who the client was,” he told The Independent. “Only once the samples were approved, we were told who it was for, and we were ecstatic. But because we’re from a small town, nobody knew what the scale of the Met Gala was but only after it came out in the press, did people know that this was something very big.”
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Santhosh and his team quickly learned how high the stakes were. The Met’s brief called for a “blank canvas” for artists to paint on but with a crucial caveat: the carpet’s construction and texture had to withstand the weight — and spectacle — of the decadent, eccentric looks set to parade across it. In other words, it had to be celebrity-proof.
“We make the weave tighter so that celebrities in stilettos don’t trip and fall down, and that their garments don’t get caught,” Santhosh explains. “Even a tiny blemish could be visible on a carpet like this, so we make sure everything is perfect.” Neytt went through multiple rounds of prototyping and a few rejections from the Met’s design team to get it right.
This event, after all, is a military-style operation. The process of laying down and decorating the carpet is so secretive that even Santhosh and his team aren’t involved.
“They have their own dedicated team in New York,” he says of the rolling out of the carpet. “No phones are allowed in the vicinity – it’s very, very private.”
Still, that doesn’t mean that Santhosh relaxes once the carpet is handed over. “We’re on our toes all the time,” he says. “And we always wait till the event is actually over to get the final feedback, so there’s always some kind of pressure.”
The Met Gala didn’t always have a red carpet — in fact, it’s only a relatively recent addition to the event. When the Met Gala began in 1948 as a high-society New York fundraiser, “doing the carpet” simply meant laying rubber treads over the museum’s concrete steps to keep unsteady VIPs from slipping after a few martinis.
When Vogue’s Anna Wintour took over as the gala’s chair in 1995, guests were still arriving on the same concrete steps; their delicate stilettos, silk dresses and long gowns snagging on the granite. In the mid-2000s, red runners were first laid along each step, before eventually expanding into a full carpet in the years that followed.
As the event has grown more extravagant, so too has the carpet. In 2016, celebrities walked along a cream rug with red and pink color-blocking as part of the “Manus x Machina” theme. In 2019, a Barbie pink rug was rolled out for that year’s event “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” Until 2022, the carpets were produced by a New Jersey firm before Neytt took over the contract in a move toward a more sustainable manufacturing process.
The role has been an honor for Santhosh and his family in Cherthala, Kerala, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who founded a carpet business in 1917.
“When we got the job, it was a proud moment for the company, also for India, that we are from a smaller town and doing something of this scale,” he says. “Lots of entrepreneurs have reached out to us, and we’re happy that we can give people confidence and inspire people to dream bigger.”
Santhosh’s favorite carpet was last year’s midnight blue design dotted with white-and-yellow daffodils for the theme “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which encouraged guests to explore Black dandyism style and identity.
“It was really nice to see people dress up and show their roots,” he says. “It was a very happy moment for us.”
Monday night’s event looks set to be star-studded despite some controversy. In attendance will be Beyoncé (who hasn’t been to the Met Gala in a decade), Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams, acting as honorary hosts alongside Wintour. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, are the main financial donors for the accompanying Met exhibition and the party itself (a choice that has been the subject of recent boycotts).
The dress code, “Fashion is Art,” is inspired by the Costume Institute’s spring show, “Costume Art,” which is said to encourage guests to think about how they can use their bodies as a blank canvas (think sculptural suits, archival designs and probably a lot of naked dresses).
While Santhosh won’t be there on the night, I wonder if he has had direct communication with the bobbed, sunglasses-clad lady behind it all. Has Wintour sent him a direct congratulations on the carpet in previous years?
“No, not yet… hopefully soon,” he says excitedly. “Hopefully, we’ll also get invited to the Met Gala at one point in time.”
