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Met Gala 2025: How a Kerala-Based Company Wove the Iconic Carpets Three Years in a Row
As stars stole the spotlight, an Indian carpet brand built the foundation of the Met Gala — one strand at a time.
At the 2022 Met Gala, celebrities in attendance responded to the theme of “In America: An Anthology of Fashion”, while in 2023, they brought their fashion A-game to pay homage to the late German cultural powerhouse Karl Lagerfeld. This year, the theme of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” inspired a flurry of looks by designers and their chosen models that left the Internet arguing over who wore it best. But besides the underlining fact that this fundraising event for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has been held on the first Monday of every May since 1948, another relatively lesser-known fact underscoring the 2022, 2023 and 2025 editions of the Gala is that an artisan-forward company in Kerala wove the coveted carpets walked by celebrities each time.
While the Internet was busy debating on how Shah Rukh Khan, Kiara Advani and Diljit Dosanjh fared at their debuts on the carpet this year, Neytt Homes — a carpet and rug company based in Alleppey — was already brainstorming about a more sustainable way to weave their offerings for the next edition, should the opportunity come their way a fourth time. “We want to recycle discarded plastic pet bottles and upcycle them to make the carpet,” says Sivan Santhosh, founder and CEO of Neytt Homes, a four-year-old organisation built with his wife Nimisha Srinivas at the bequest of his forebears who’ve been in the carpet-weaving business for over a century.
Within months of their launch in 2021, an old-time legacy client in the US state of Kentucky brought the proposition of weaving a giant carpet measuring 6,840 square metres. They started work, “but without knowing it was for the Met Gala. We knew it was for some big show, but which show specifically, we weren’t really aware of,” Santhosh recalls. Approximately 57 rolls of 4 metres by 30 metres of sisal fabric — whose fibres are derived from the Agave sisalana plants in Madagascar, also the source for agave-based alcohols like tequila — have been used each year to bring the carpet to life by 480 people, working over a span of 90 days.
“Only after working on this carpet for two months did they reveal to us that this was for the Met Gala,” Santhosh says, reminiscing a moment that went on to foreshadow the coming days in which their business travelled further and wider than ever before.
In 2022, Hollywood A-lister Blake Lively arrived at the Gala in her baroque, shimmering rose-gold Atelier Versace gown, only to shed it and reveal a light blue train inspired by New York’s Grand Central Station’s constellation mural. In that moment, everyone noticed how her dramatic outfit “twinned” with the carpet in deep red, bordered by cream and blue strips. She had, arguably, been the most talked-about celebrity at the fundraiser that season, and the carpet was pivotal to it. “We make the base canvas for the carpet and send it to New York, where artists paint with their hands on it,” Santhosh explains. The brief, however, is that the base must always be pristine white, including this year when it was painted a midnight blue with daisies on it.
“There couldn’t be errors, especially in 2023 when the carpet was, in fact, white in colour,” Santhosh says. “Any flaw would’ve been easily and immediately noticeable.”
Labour of Love and Precision
The process of putting this carpet together is one of utmost precision and diligence, where each strand is crafted with care. According to Santhosh, only the longest and whitest fibres from Madagascar make the cut. But being a stickler for quality means one takes the fibres through another round of careful sorting, considering how the same lot, sourced from the same field, may have minor variations in colour. “Once it reaches us, we sort it again by hand for the whitest white, because it is a natural and undyed fibre that can come in different shades,” Santhosh says.
The fibres are then spun, blended and spun again to convert them into single-ply yarn. “It is then plied with another single-ply yarn and made into a double-ply yarn,” Santhosh goes on, breaking down a technique that demands astute fidelity and obsessive monitoring.
Once the yarns have been plied, they are then sheared, which entails stripping every strand of protruding fibres to make them finer than ever, following which they’re mounted on bobbins to be fed to the looms. “It is at this stage that they are woven into carpets,” Santhosh says, “and it’s no mean feat because even the smallest of impurities on such a huge wall-to-wall carpet is magnified.”
While the carpet is mostly entirely painted on, sections of it inside the museum are left unpainted. A special weave, called the bouclé (pronounced “book-lay”) was settled upon after several rounds of testing and prototyping. What makes this weave special is that its looped yarn has a nubby texture that lends it its softness and durability. “A lot of celebrities walk this carpet in heels, so we had to make sure nobody trips and falls on it. This weave makes sure of that,” Santhosh says.
Expectedly, the maiden year was the steepest climb for Neytt Homes, as the research and development carried out from scratch was a first for the firm for a project of this scale. In the second year, the weave was tightened, which was then repeated in the third year. “The spray painting with stencils happens once the carpet has reached New York, and they lay it out at the museum,” Santhosh reveals.
Slow but Steady
In 2022, the company did not publicise their work and only kept their heads down and continued to do what they do best. “We weren’t sure how people would take it if we let everyone know about it,” says Santhosh. However, in 2023, he decided to tell a few of his friends and a couple of others, following which news travelled out and quickly became a viral sensation on the Internet.
“I have always been aware of the import of the Met Gala, but even our employees now have understood what it really means,” he says. When local authorities and ministers started to take note and congratulate the firm, the local workers’ community was assured of the value of their efforts. “Such acknowledgments really matter to our craftspeople, because it brings them pride and joy to know that something they have made with their own hands has travelled to an event of such huge magnitude,” Santhosh reflects.
But besides seeing some of their favourite celebrities embrace their creation in moments that have gone down as highlights in cultural history, what else has kept the firm on its toes? “Newer, bigger opportunities,” like designing for COP28 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference) in Dubai in December 2023, and collaborating with a host of established architects and designers — like Ashiesh Shah, Sarita Handa, Vinu Daniel and Sandeep Khosla, to name a few — of international repute.
At Neytt Homes, local craftsmanship is what takes centrestage, even and especially when their offerings are under a global spotlight. According to its founder, it is what, at the end of the day, makes all the difference and sets them apart.