The first Monday in May; it’s the highest of high days in the fashion calendar, the Holy of Holies, the Sistine Chapel for those who pray at the feet of Saint Laurent. Or at least it was.
Someone call it. Note the time. Jot down the date. The Met Gala? It’s ovaaaah. Deader than the fax machine or Gen Z’s chance of home ownership.
This year clicking, clicking, clicking through Old Testament-length photo galleries of celebrities’ arriving at the Gala, of names preparing to ascend the Met’s stairs with all the solemnity of one about to have a transcendental face-to-face with Xeno, felt bleak.
The Gala, a 77-year-old tent pole of Haute Société has been body swapped into a hollow marketing circus; a leadenly commercialised, three-ring affair where brand synergies rule and break through Netflix series are shoved down the red carpet to radiate such affected nonchalance it’s a choking hazard.
The Gala used to be a society event but is now just a branding activation writ grossly large.
Look, this is the Met we are talking about not Marx; the Gala has never been a night for the great unwashed and the air inside the museum has always been the most socially rarefied going outside the Royal Enclosure at Ascot or Joan Collins’ Table at Club 55. But it also used to be a glorious one-night-only cocktail of human taste, genuine Personalities, bon vivants and the sorts who can identify a blazer from Tom Ford’s legendary ‘96 Gucci collection at 20 paces and through the impenetrable fug of Kate Moss’ ciggie smoke.
What used to be an event that an invitation to signalled Making It is now nothing but a vast, vast commercial military operation, where each celebrity’s look is solely designed to be clipped and sliced and diced for social media. Forget couture, all the Met Gala is now is a content sausage factory and just another station of the cross on the PR roster. (The others; The Oscars, Cannes and Derek Blasberg’s Instagram.)
At this year’s Gala I doubt there was a single celebrity guest who had actually chosen so much as their underpants themselves. Every dress would have been focus grouped and A/B tested to exhaustion; there would have been long sleepless nights in marketing departments and 5.17am emails and such extensive negotiations they should probably send a delegation from Chanel or similar to sort out the Strait of Hormuz.
Then guests, mostly the women, are judged and divvied onto best and worst dresses lists, like Holsteins going through a Gympie stock yard but with more tulle.
Not helping the general feeling of this year’s Gala being a tipping point, this formally great fashion feast day jumping the shark, came when Lauren Sanchez Bezos made her grand entrance, the ultimate triumph of cheque book fame.
If only the theme had been Filthy Lucre.
On Monday, it was reported that she and husband Jeff had paid at least $USD10 million to co-host the event.
Even Marie Antoinette would have baulked at such cash-y crassness.
Yes, the newly rich have been buying their way into society since Edith Wharton picked up her first fountain pen but the gaucheness, the blatantness of the Bezoses’ unabashed buy-in has nuked whatever real social cache the Gala still had going for it.
Started in 1948 to fundraise for the museum’s Costume Institute the evening was, for decades, a glittering convening of the 0.01 per cent of jetsetting Jackie O-palling society sorts, where Parisian couturiers dangling ivory cigarette holders mingled with Capote-ian social X-rays and the first super models. The very first tickets would set you back $50.
Then in 1995 Anna Wintour took the helm (she has had the odd year off) and realised inviting a few Oscar winners might liven the room up; unfortunately couture grand dame Nan Kempner firing bon mots while a slurry Gore Vidal slugged back Gibsons was never going to set the masses’ hair on fire.
So along came Anne and her not-so-little black book and hey presto. In 1997 when socialite Pat Buckley walked in, having herself chaired the event for years, she reportedly looked around and asked, “Who are these people?”
But Anna’s new formula worked. Golly did it work. The dresses got madder, louder, brighter. Soon a star’s true arrival on the A list would be signalled by them having been anointed by Anna and them tremulously mounting the steps towards the high altar of the Met. (Fitting the actual dinner is often held inside the museum’s Temple of Dendur.)
At some point in the early aughties the Gala started to filter into magazines and the entertainment blood stream; soon people who flicked through US Weekly while queuing to pay for their Hot Pockets at the checkout in Hoboken were au fait with an event that used to exist in only for people who never went below 60th street.
Every year since then has been a greater and greater triumph of marketing spend over authentic cool or chic and it’s now just a branded jamboree and demand coming up with the stuntiest look imaginable to ensure your client goes gangbusters on social media.
Also I wonder, do any of the guests truly have any fun once they are inside? Or for the attendees, the women trapped in polyurethane tubes and ironmongered corsets, their plates of dinner ignored and congealing, the acid anxiety of worrying if you’ve worked the room hard enough, is that just it? Another night of work?
Because that’s what the Gala now looks like – work. Work for the celebrities who really, really want a part in the next White Lotus and whose $140,000-a-plate tickets are bankrolled by Nasdaq-listed companies and work to stay relevant and cool and to hold onto your place in the TikTok algorithm and on the greasy pole of celebrity.
Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead’ – what a party pooper. But that’s kinda the vibe.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.