Unscripted: Met Gala one step on a journey toward viewing fashion as art [entertainment column] | Entertainment

Decades ago, I read a magazine essay that posited that fashion is a type of art — one you wear on your body to express yourself.

The “express yourself” part I understood. But fashion as an art medium? I was skeptical. I thought that this notion gave the clothes you put on way more significance than they deserve.

I thought about that long-ago essay on Monday night, after my annual watch of the red-carpet arrivals at the Met Gala in New York — with loud comments from myself and a work colleague, both disses and yasses, hurled at the TV screen.

The dress code for the evening was “Fashion is Art.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art — the Costume Institute of which is the beneficiary of funds raised by the event — said the theme was a chance for the invited celebrities to “express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and celebrate the countless depictions of the dressed body throughout art history.”

Rihanna arrives at the Met Gala in New York on Monday, May 4.. She is said to have based her embellished gown on works by Flemish primitive painters.

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Having long ago come around to the idea that fashion is an art medium, I enjoyed seeing how the Met Gala attendees used references from the fine art world to turn their clothes, and their bodies, into art.

While many celebrities pretty much ignored the theme, opting for traditional gala glamour, others worked with fashion designers to bring art works and movements into their looks that they modeled on the green, Claude Monet-inspired carpet.

I saw outfits that were nods to abstract expressionist drip paintings, cubist works, Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises,” Monet’s “Water Lilies” and the golden geometric patterns used by Gustav Klimt.

“Girls” creator Lena Dunham told interviewers her red Valentino gown was a nod to the blood spatter in Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi’s biblical painting “Judith Slaying Holofernes” — a work that, at one time, was my computer screen saver.

Rihanna’s bronze-colored, heavily beaded Margiela Couture gown that seemed to be shaped like an oval picture frame was said to be a nod to the Flemish primitive painters of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Contemporary artist Amy Sherald wore a blue-and-white dress and red hat taken directly from one of the portraits I saw in her “American Sublime” exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which I wrote about in this column in November.

Actor Anne Hathaway, who will portray Penelope in the upcoming film of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” sported a hand-painted gown inspired by Grecian pottery.

I didn’t need to see bits of famous paintings on women’s dresses and men’s coats to know that fashion is a form of art, but my journey to that opinion has been a circuitous one.

I’m far from being a fashionista — I’ve long wished the Garanamals company would make their mix-and-match baby and toddler separates for adults like me — but I’ve come to love to see fashion on other people.

I can’t draw or paint worth a darn, but I love going to art museums and checking out the latest exhibits. It’s the same with fashion.

Anne Hathaway arrives at the Met Gala in New York on Monday, May 4. Hathaway’s hand-painted gown references Greek pottery.

Evan Agostini (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Reading that fashion-as-art essay came at a time in my life where I could not have cared much less about fashion. While as a teenager I enjoyed trying on cute outfits at the Wrangler Wroost in my hometown, dressing up for special occasions and fully embracing 1970s hemline trends that alternated among mini, midi and maxi, I was destined to be a walking fashion faux pas during my college years.

I’d sleep as late as possible before class, roll out of bed, throw a flannel shirt on over a T-shirt and bib overalls, accessorize with my favorite gray hiking boots and call it a day.

I had to borrow a sweater from my college roommate to have something decent to wear for my senior portrait.

My late 1970s wardrobe at my first newspaper reporting job out of college was so lame that, when called upon to interview freshman U.S. Senator Arlen Specter at the last minute, I had to run back to my little apartment to throw on a casual floral skirt and the only top I could find to match — a teal leotard. My dress for a White House reception I was invited to in 1980 came from a chain store in the mall — thank you, Fashion Bug!

A few years later, I became a regular viewer of CNN’s “Style with Elsa Klensch” show throughout the 1980s and ’90s, where I learned about designers like Christian Lacroix, Issey Miyake and Karl Lagerfeld.

Already a fan of Joan Rivers, I eventually made her “Fashion Police” episodes — a round table of sometimes brutal critiques of celebrities’ sartorial efforts at awards shows — part of my appointment television.

Later came “Project Runway” fandom. Coincidentally, one of my all-time favorite show challenges came in Season 4, Episode 11 (“The Art of Fashion”), in which then-mentor Tim Gunn took the contestants to the Met to find inspiration for their design looks in the museum’s paintings and other works.

Lena Dunham arrives at the Met Gala in New York on Monday, May 4, in New York. Dunham said she based her gown on the color of the blood spatter in Artemisia Gentileschi’s 17th-century painting, “Judith Slaying Holofernes.”

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Gunn, whom I had a great time interviewing by phone in 2015 when he came to Lancaster to speak at an event, told me that, when he has spare time, “… I walk across the park from my apartment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I haunt the place. I can’t get enough of it.” A life filled with fashion and art.

Checking out, and commenting on, the red-carpet looks at awards shows such as the Academy Awards are now an essential part of my viewing experience each year.

Lately, I follow Quarryville native Johnny Weir and his broadcasting partner and bestie, Tara Lipinski, on social media to check out the fun they have dancing in their matching outfits and showing off their latest Hermès Birkin bags.

Now that the Met Gala is over, I’ll check out the celebrity fashions this week on the red-carpeted steps at the Cannes Film Festival — steps I stood and was photographed on during a fall 1991 trip to France, dressed in a comfy outfit from the casual department of Boscov’s — and awards shows like the Tonys next month and the Emmys in September.

I completely understand some people’s aversion to the excesses of the Met Gala (and Hollywood awards shows in general). I get the cringe element of rich folks paying extravagant sums to hobnob with Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos and on over-the-top outfits meant to catch the eye of the paparazzi. I applaud New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s release of a photo spread on Met Gala Monday, putting the spotlight on six tailors and other unsung professionals who work behind the scenes in various aspects of the city’s garment industry (tinyurl.com/bdz42npn).

I love watching the videos of the creative looks at the free Brooklyn People’s Ball, where non-celebrities strut their ultra-creative looks at the Brooklyn Central Library the day before the Met Gala each year.

But, in a world of reality TV shows, TikToks created by modern-day versions of circus geeks and next month’s return of the “Jackass” movie franchise, I guess I’ve just lived too long to feel the need to apologize for my guilty pleasures.

And looking at fashion-as-art — worn by other people — has gradually become, and probably always will be, one of mine.

“Unscripted” is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.