The Met Gala happened again! I’m writing to you this week from nowhere near New York with my non-expert commentary. This year it’s extra-hard because of all the heavily recycled takes that everyone has now, such as ‘This whole event is deeply tone-deaf’ (that’s the point), ‘Stop relying so heavily on the 1960s’ (wrong, more later), and ‘Celebrities can’t dress themselves’ (what did you expect when you dismantled the Hollywood studio system).
Kim ‘Single White Female’ Kardashian
I think that this moment - the wearing of the dress, the curatorial debate - is just the latest in the long parade of intentional controversies which have fuelled the Kardashian-Jenner family through several different zeitgeists. Kim Kardashian and her PR team were clearly aware that this might spark dissent. The accompanying footage is meant to be angering. The Kardashian-Monroe comparison prompts viewers to reflect on the past and Kim’s place in it. Any skilled PR person would conclude right away that their client would end up slated.
The major issue with this controversy, and with almost all Kardashian scandals, is that it is accompanied by no actual sense of historical continuity and poetic justice. The dress has a meaning (presidential infidelity); the meaning has not been extended into the present. Kim left her rap-god husband and is messing around with a forlorn type from Saturday Night Live. Nobody wants to imagine her having an affair with the current American president, who is 79 years old and looks like a reanimated corpse.
An additional mistake: the point of the Kardashian family is that they can survive any cultural turn without fading from the public eye, that they as good as exist to remind onlookers that they are still alive. The point of Marilyn Monroe in contemporary culture is that she was ephemeral, a brief blink of female beauty remembered because of her untimely death, like L’inconnue de la Seine. It does not make sense to bring back her clothes and personal effects in any capacity beyond museum display, because the whole selling point of those clothes is that they were never supposed to touch a warm body again and belong only to a dream. It is concerning that some of her possessions are held by a gimmicky institution with little respect for preserving the pagan meanings of Old Hollywood, something much more important than the era’s material culture.
Bella ‘Only the One That Inflicts the Pain Can Take it Away’ Hadid
A passage from Society of the Spectacle which I will take completely out of context:
I used to think the use of dominatrix imagery in the celebrity domain was always totally cringeworthy. I now think there are instances where it can be a clever satire - these are famous women, and they are taking charge of our attention (a sapped resource). We know they are evil or unethical or untalented or nepotism babies and we worship them anyway, often against our will. See also Madonna’s Erotica, which appears to be an empty provocation but can also be read as metacommentary on fame, timeliness and transformation.
The look works on Hadid because there is a defined ‘30s feel to her face. She looks androgynous and chiselled and could believably be some sort of brothel madame extra made up by an early incarnation of the MGM costume department for a black-and-white Gilded Age period drama starring Bette Davis. The hair, draped fabric and anklet look authentically 1890s. I would not be surprised if parts were copied from one of those political cartoons where Great Britain is the mistress of the world, etc.
Anok ‘I’m Into It’ Yai
Yai was also my favourite from the last Met Gala (upmarket Great Gatsby dress, symbolic green gems). This look is less immediately on-theme, but it makes more sense when you look closely - the gloves, the earrings, the way her skirt falls behind her. I am including it not only because she looks great but also to make a contrarian point about fashion references. Those complaining about the ‘60s aesthetics and colours this year are mostly off-base, because there was in fact a notable Gilded Age revival in fashion and film during that decade, probably best preserved in the My Fair Lady movie musical (beloved by costume enthusiasts). The exaggerated silhouettes, colours and manners of the late 19th century meshed well with the ‘60s camp sensibility, so I think it is perfectly reasonable for a designer to make some sort of connection between those two eras. This is why we need media literacy!!
Fredrik ‘International Man of Mystery’ Robertsson
I am no longer tired of people wearing Iris van Herpen. I am also not entirely sure of the intention behind this look, but for some reason it actually does read as Gilded Age - I’m getting Leon Bakst vibes and an overall throwback to ‘gay Russian ballerina in a travelling production of The Firebird’, and I think the ladies in The Age of Innocence would definitely go and see this man dance mostly to people-watch and stare down at the stalls below with opera glasses, and then some sort of intrigue would happen in their box during the interval (that’s not intentional innuendo). Also - it turns out that nobody actually knows who Fredrik Robertsson is or what he does. He’s featured on the Visit Stockholm website as a ‘fashionable mystery man’. This is what celebrity culture was missing all along! It’s like we’re living in an 1870s period drama!