Sickening displays of wealth at Met Gala make it feel like the last days of Rome
With 35 million Americans living below the poverty line, the $350,000 cost of a table at the Met Gala seems particularly tone deaf
“Good evening everyone and welcome to Scotland’s first-ever Met Gala-shiels, sponsored by Irn-Bru. Here, on the steps of the Volunteer Hall, the cream of Scotland’s celebrities have gathered to celebrate fashion. Look everyone, first to arrive it’s The Proclaimers in matching tartan shirts. And here comes STV weatherman Sean Batty accessorising an umbrella.”
Nope, it doesn’t work but then neither does the original Met Gala anymore. What began in 1948 as a modest fundraiser to support the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has metamorphosised into everything that’s wrong with the world right now.
Chief architect of this awfulness is former Vogue editor Anna Wintour, a woman best known for wearing sunglasses in the dark and being the inspiration for a monster in the film The Devil Wears Prada. She turned the Met Gala into the biggest celebrity night out of the year, a shining beacon of exclusivity.
Gen Z’s Christopher Biggins
Then global shelf-fillers Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez bought the rights to host it for $20 million. Turn the clock back a decade and the online salesman and his ambitious wife appeared to represent everything Anna Wintour despised about the march of technology. Now they’re suddenly in her good books and calling the shots.
Images from the gathering have been everywhere this week. Madonna dressed as an old sailing galleon. Katy Perry seemingly wearing a helmet from her hilarious non-space mission, as if we haven’t had enough of all that. And singer Sam Smith, the Christopher Biggins of Gen Z, dressed as a plumber from Falkirk in a boiler suit accessorised with a white van (sadly that didn’t happen but it would have been funnier if it had).
My favourite was actress Sarah Paulson who came with a dollar bill stuck on her face. Asked what it signified, she replied: "The one per cent." I’m guessing she’s referring to the tiny proportion of people who are said to control most of the wealth, power and property in America.
It would have been a searing indictment if Sarah hadn’t been about to sit down with exactly those people for rack of lamb with parmesan gnocchi. With some of the dresses costing more than $1 million, a more powerful statement would have been for Sarah to turn up in Gap jeans and a T-shirt with a sign saying, “I’ve donated the cost of my outfit to poor families”. That would have been something.
Heralding a revolution?
But then she wouldn’t have been raising awareness, that other great get-out-of-jail-free card for vain narcissists. In this information-rich age, is it possible to have our awareness raised any further on everything from climate change to the plight of hedgehogs trying to cross the road? I’d actually like to have less awareness of a few modern issues.
With tickets costing $350,000 a table, the Met Ball would come across as a kind of ‘last days of Rome’ event at any time. But in a cost-of-living crisis with 35 million Americans living below the poverty line, it seems particularly tone deaf. What’s next, Beyonce as Marie Antoinette handing out free cake to the homeless on the Met steps?
Celebrities always like to tell us they are agents of change. I’m not sure heralding a revolution is quite the change they are hoping for.
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