Remember, back in the heady days of global lockdown, when the world mocked the tone-deaf antics of celebrities who wanted to make it all about them? Remember how we thought, for just one moment, that part of the New Normal might be a rejection of the adulation of the rich and famous and the end of celebrity culture? Of course, as with every other aspect of the New Normal, it reverted right back to the Old Normal once the pandemic was under control, with everyone eager to return to every awful aspect of the pre-Covid days as quickly as possible and the social elite keen to re-establish their place as better than the rest of us. That one shining moment of realisation about the fatuous, attention-hungry hypocrisy of celebrity was lost, probably forever, and soon they were back flaunting their riches while preaching to the rest of us about social issues.
Still, it takes some nerve for the Met Gala – that ghastly orgy of elitism and consumption that is organised by Vogue in between bouts of social justice white knighting – to base the entire event on the divide between the rich and the poor. To do so now, at a time of global conflict that continually teeters on the verge of disaster, climate chaos, increased awareness of social inequality, political instability and a growing unrest from the great unwashed, feels almost like a moment of provocation.
This year’s event took J.G. Ballard‘s short story The Garden of Time as its theme and dress code for attendees. Ballard’s work is described as dystopian so often that they might as well use his photo as a dictionary definition of the term, and this 1962 story is one of his most dystopian visions, in which an aristocratic couple hold out in their crumbling villa with extensive gardens against the coming mob of the dispossessed who are marching on it. Only the ‘time flowers’ that grow in the garden can delay the inevitable – when one is picked, time is shifted, the mob sent back and the villa is briefly returned to its former splendour. But the flowers are running out and the mob – seemingly the survivors of some great disaster who did not have the wealth and power to weather whatever storm had come. While the story is told from the viewpoint of the Count and Countess, make no mistake – this is a tale of the return of the repressed, a revolution against privilege, probably inspired by Ballard’s own experiences in Shanghai as the colonial world was brought brutally to an end during WW2. Where his sympathies lie in the story is debatable – but it is no celebration of wealth and elitism.
Privilege and elitism are at the very heart of the Met Gala, where a ticket costs $75,000 – assuming that you are even invited – and many of the outfits probably don’t cost much less. It’s an orgy of consumerism disguised as a charity event – though the wealthy attendees and Vogue could simply donate the money to charity without the costs of an extravagant red-carpet event biting into the funds if they wanted to. Like the wealthy film stars who demand that we put our hands in our pockets to raise less than their fee for a single movie, they don’t do anything for nothing. The biggest winners of the Met Gala are not the charities but the magazine, the fashion designers and the flavour-of-the-week celebs who see their profile (and so their price) increased by attendance.
You might wonder, then, why The Garden of Time was chosen as a Met Gala theme. It would be nice to think that it was a subversive choice by someone at Vogue but honestly, that seems a stretch. There has been no suggestion that that was the plan and everyone involved seems clueless about the wider theme of the story. It has been said – by Cliff-note style summaries online – that the story is an “exploration of humanity’s tendency towards cycles of creation and destruction”, which is one way of looking at it I suppose. Perhaps the only way, if you have found the title online and not actually read the story. It feels more like someone has taken the Met’s new exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion and its theme of reviving fragile and decaying clothes from the past, looked online for a suitable title that seems to match the concept and run with it. Let’s be fair – it seems unlikely that Anna Wintour and her lackeys will have the social awareness to have had any actual understanding of the story’s themes (or to have even read it). Similarly, the sort of celebs who attend this event are not the sort to have read the story – I doubt that any of the outfits worn reflected the broken and filthy clothing of the encroaching mob in Ballard’s tale because where is the glamour in that? If they did, it might seem an even more blatant slap in the face.
If you had read Ballard’s story, it’s hard to imagine that you would choose to attend an event like this. It might make you stop to think that perhaps this is not the time to flaunt your wealth. The attendees felt like a parade of the vacuous – here today, gone later today pop stars, fading divas, passing fashionistas and trust fund reality stars. People who need constant validation and reassurance that they matter because they know, deep inside, that they don’t. You can watch the red carpet at the Met Gala and laugh at the hubris of it all – the pouting poses for a gaggle of bellowing paps by people you’ve never heard of, the trying-too-hard glamour of people that never smile, the sycophantic grovelling of Vogue‘s awful, bumbling interviewers and the hilarity of outfits that are unwearable – one nobody last night had to be carried up the stairs because her dress made lifting her feet impossible, a moment that she probably felt was the height of validation but just made her look like an idiot. But I struggle to see the fun in it all. The event feels like an invitation to class war at the best of times and the use of Ballard’s story as a theme seems so wrong-headed as to be mind-boggling.
Where next for the event, I wonder? Perhaps in 2025, they can use Poe’s Masque of the Red Death as the theme, an even more ironically appropriate narrative for an event that locks the masses out only for the horror to arrive anyway.
DAVID FLINT
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