Fashion thrives under pageantry, and few events generate spectacle to the extent that the Met Gala does. Held annually, it is fashion’s most powerful fundraiser, organised by Conde Nast’s global chief content editor, Anna Wintour, for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. (Specifically, the gala celebrates the museum’s forthcoming spring exhibition.) To those who worship at one of fashion’s most iconic altars, there is no better way to commemorate the first Monday of May; to its critics, it is just a big, tacky party for the rich and famous. In either reading, it is undisputed that the Met Gala is one of the most meaningful ways in which the arts intersect with wealth, visibility and power on a global stage.
The Institute’s exhibition this year is “Costume Art”; correspondingly, the Met’s theme was “Fashion is Art”. (Costume for a costume exhibition? Groundbreaking.) In a press release from February, the Met Museum said, “The show will examine the centrality of the dressed body… to illuminate the indivisible connection between clothing and the body [and] the complex interplay between artistic representations of the body and fashion as an embodied artform.” Of all the themes the Met has chosen before, this year’s felt particularly abstract, compared, for instance, to 2023’s theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: Line of Beauty”.
But it felt especially pertinent in a cultural moment that is seeing (mostly) female celebrities becoming very thin, very quickly. In recent years, the gilt falsely ascribed to celebrity has been exposed as the fragile veneer it is, and what was once considered physically aspirational is turning into concern as bodies continue to become ever more slender. Last year’s Met was hailed as the Ozempic Olympics, and celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Vera Wang and Lizzo were noted for their far-slimmer frames. (Though none have publicly commented on their weight loss, or the means in which it was attained.) And it’s a body ideal that is clearly, queasily, still in vogue, with the increasingly gaunt figures of Olivia Wilde, Maude Apatow and Nicole Kidman gliding hauntingly across the carpet.
Fashion generally, but particularly the avant-garde the Met is renowned for encouraging, has long resisted self-expression that feels constrained; designers have often used the body as a site of rebellion against conformity, subverting expectations of how the body should appear. Some of fashion’s most iconic moments emerged from its creators’ need to disrupt or unsettle, exorcise or transmute: Alexander McQueen’s otherworldly 2009 show “Plato’s Atlantis” saw its models resemble marine creatures; Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” collection posited a radical image of the body through its bulbous, distorted and grotesque silhouettes; the Schiaparelli Haute Couture gown that Bella Hadid wore at the Cannes Film Festival five years ago, which was accessorised with a brass necklace of a human lung’s pulmonary veins, transformed her from supermodel to anthropomorphic beauty.
This disruptive spirit is amplified at the Met. When Princess Diana made her gala debut in 1996 wearing a Christian Dior navy blue slip dress designed by John Galliano, which she’d ripped the corset out of, she destabilised what was understood to be appropriate attire for a royal; Rihanna instigated conversations on how to display cultural appreciation in 2015 when she wore a yellow dress, accompanied by a fabulously extravagant 16ft train, by the Chinese designer Guo Pei in recognition of the theme “China: Through the Looking Glass”. These moments have become iconic, not only because they defied norms and expectations, but also because they made statements that mattered.
This is what distinguishes the Met from other red carpets, such as the Oscars or the Baftas. While the latter asks for a certain adherence to social nous, the former insists on rejecting it. The Met wants theatre, absurdity, camp. As the theme notes, fashion is art, and the body cannot but be included, as it’s the canvas on which aesthetic sensibilities are articulated. But the use of weight-loss medication in Hollywood is now so ubiquitous that the body is increasingly being rendered merely performative; its natural mechanisms – in this instance hunger – are dulled or ignored. Still, the question remains: how much can be expressed on a concerningly thin body, a withering frame in a sea of withering frames?
Part of the Met’s allure is seeing the myriad interpretations of a theme; the aesthetic diversity it inspires. But in this current climate of ultra-thin celebrities, not only is the range of bodies inhabiting these clothes becoming narrowed, but also the range of statements that can be communicated through them. Fashion’s claim to champion diverse artistic expression is starting to sound as hollow as the bodies we are bearing witness to. It is, in the immortal words of the great André Leon Talley, a famine of beauty.
From a financial standpoint, the Met will endure: the event provides the Institute with its primary source of funding for annual exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and operations. Individual tickets to this year’s gala are $100,000 (making it $25,000 more expensive than last year), while tables, which typically seat ten guests, start at $350,000. Last year, the event raised a record $31m for the Institute. However, its cultural capital is less certain: some found it unsavoury that this year’s honorary chairs were Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren; many celebrities, such as Meryl Streep and Zendaya, did not attend, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, broke with tradition by declining his invitation; regular normies looked on at the thin figures as a disturbing race to the bottom that few outside of Hollywood want to see. (“It’s like watching women compete to be the thinnest,” my friend observed. “It’s pretty disgusting to see.”) We have never looked at the Met to tell us what to wear – it’s far too theatrical – but we have always looked to it for inspired self-expression. But if we are increasingly horrified by what we see, will we have no choice but to avert our gaze?
[Further reading: I read Russell Brand’s unreadable new book, for my sins]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment