It seems that social media has killed good taste at the Met Gala!
It was once touted as the epitome of chic, but celebrities attending New York’s premier fashion event are now more likely to be playing it for laughs – and Likes!
If you don’t know, the Met Gala is fashion’s biggest night of the year. Returning to the traditional first-Monday-in-May slot on the social calendar for the first time in three years, i.e. May 02, this year’s party made it abundantly clear that the fashion world is not remotely chastened, dimmed or otherwise humbled by the pandemic.
From Katy Perry as a hamburger to Rihanna as the pope, the party has given us the most unforgettable celebrity looks of the past decade, and this year’s event showed no sign of slowing down.
Modern party dressing, trailblazed by the Met, is dressing up as fancy dress rather than dressing up as an aspiration to elegance. Fashion’s biggest night of the year is now entirely about looking spectacular, rather than stylish.
Much is made of the ultra-exclusive invite list of the Met Gala where individual tickets are reported to cost over $30,000, but what happens inside the party is entirely beside the point.
Actually, the real party happens on Instagram, and everyone is invited. Kim Kardashian’s 300 million followers saw her in the very dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing Happy Birthday to JFK in 1962 before her table mates did!
The cartoonish wackiness is so prevalent. Jessie Buckley, in a Schiaparelli suit, wore a fake moustache. Gigi Hadid wore a burgundy latex bodysuit under a vast puffer jacket. Dakota Johnson and Jared Leto came as identical twins, down to their red satin bow ties and crystal hair barrettes.
And beneath all that irreverent silliness, the pursuit of impossible levels of physical perfection is a deadly serious business. Kim Kardashian revealed that because Monroe’s dress was a historical artefact and could not be altered, she lost 16lbs in three weeks to fit into it.
Cara Delevingne, taking the dress code of Gilded Glamour literally, removed the top half of her Dior morning suit on the red carpet to reveal nothing but gold body paint with matching nipple covers. Emily Ratajkowski, similarly, chose vintage Versace – it was last worn by model Yasmeen Ghauri on a 1992 Versace runway and making its Met Gala reappearance a moment around three decades in the making – made entirely of beads and chains above the waist, without even a wisp of fabric. The approval of the arbiters of good taste has been replaced by social media’s rapacious appetite for bare flesh.
