Frock horror! In these dark times, let us be grateful for the ludicrous spectacle of the Met Gala
Lana Del Rey attends the Met Gala in New York City, 6 May 2024. Photograph: Bauzen/GC Images
Tuesday is officially the morning after the Met Gala of the night before, when we civilians get to press our noses up against the glass of our phone screens and pass unsparing judgment on dresses whose trains alone cost more than HS2.
If you haven’t sat in mismatched pyjamas huffing toast while remarking what an unacceptable misstep Lana Del Rey’s mosquito net was, and how Chanel seems to be going tits up, then you have simply failed to capitalise on the digital banquet spread out for you. These are dark times, and nothing but … gratitude, I think? … should be shown for film director Taika Waititi’s decision to come dressed as a brown pleather three-piece suite, while his wife, Rita Ora, presented as the ribbon curtain tacked over their back door to keep the flies off it.
Despite – and indeed because of – its best efforts not to be, the Met Gala often feels like a spectacle staged for the tricoteuses camping out round the bottom of the guillotine. This is an event where even Lauren Sánchez – helicopter-piloting fauxlanthropist and fiancee of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – had to silently swallow her debut being marked by a rash of stories alleging she had such “poor taste” that Met Gala organisers were having to supervise her dress choice. Lauren eventually showed up on Monday in court-ordered monochrome. “I didn’t want people saying: ‘Oh that’s so Lauren – sexy, low-cut’,” she explained defeatedly to reporters.
Elsewhere the mob has been well sated by the sight of Manchurian Ozempic spokesmodel Kim Kardashian corseting down her waist to around the 10cm mark – and possibly spared the job of an execution. If Kim’s squeezed middle appears alarming in still photographs, it looks positively disturbing in the moving footage, as the apex predator of the red carpet totters and lurches before the photographers, looking for all the world like she could pass out if she doesn’t make it up the Met museum’s front stairs and get loaded straight into a vintage Emerson iron lung (fall/winter 1955).
From prison reform to the perfect nude foundation garment, Kim has a number of causes close to her heart. But not on Met Gala night, when even several of her ribs weren’t close to her heart, and may well have been in different zip codes to her heart, either squeezed down into the area normally occupied by her femurs, or possibly being used by God to fashion her a helpmeet.
Were Kim to have expired on the hallowed carpet, it would surely have been for absolutely the only cause permitted at the Met Gala: fashion itself. Here is the sole event in the entire showbiz calendar where no celebrity would dare to even wear a minuscule political pin or ribbon, or say one remotely cause-adjacent thing during the arrivals process, for fear of transgressing the adamantine edicts of party empress Anna Wintour.
Wintour is the longtime US Vogue editor-in-chief, who took this event from AN Other New York charity fundraising party to the mega-event we see today – a party where a single ticket costs $75,000 and all obedient celebrities wear a minimum of two outfits during the evening. These celebrities she replaced the socialites with are genuinely, hilariously terrified of Wintour. Thus an event obsessed with its own relevance cannot actually engage with its times. This feels a shame. Fashion is often at its most amusing when it seeks to make a point, from Zoolander’s activism to the 2022 Balenciaga catwalk show where models were required to haul $20,000 dresses through a mud pit because of something to do with refugees. (Again, I think.)
That said, perhaps Wintour’s gifts in this department could be made use of at a higher level in this polarised age? When rumours swirled back in 2012 that Barack Obama was thinking of appointing her US ambassador in London, many were disparaging, with one naysayer analyst describing the London job as “America’s most diplomatic posting”. (Is it? Surely you only have to cable back a bit of gossip tarted up as intelligence, and erect a Christmas tree twice the size of the king’s?) Today, Wintour’s ability to ruthlessly depoliticise any situation should clearly be deployed nationally and internationally. Failing that, perhaps next year’s Met Gala theme could be the era-defining meme spawned by Kourtney Kardashian, back in an old episode of their reality show when her sister Kim was in hysterics about losing a $75,000 diamond earring in the sea. As Kourtney put it both rightly and somehow still very wrongly: “Kim, there’s people that are dying …”
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist