It was the most political Met Gala ever

Kim Kardashian couldn't breathe in the Maison Margiela Couture corset she wore last night at the Met Gala. Making her debut on the red carpet of the New York museum, Tyla had to be carried by four men in tuxedos because her sand dress was indeformable. Kendall Jenner pulled out an archive look never worn before, Zendaya left everyone in awe with a trio of formidable haute couture dresses, Bad Bunny even more with what could have looked like a Renaissance hat. Inspired by J.G. Ballard's The Garden of Time, tonight's exhibition and dinner at the Metropolitan Museum paid grand homage to nature and decay, from floral stylistic codes to the revival of wonderful haute couture dresses forgotten over time. For the first time in Met Gala history, all the guests managed to stick to the predefined theme, albeit at the cost of putting aside any political reference. While on the red carpet - which this year was green - roses flourished and hourglasses were carried, outside the Met the crowd protested against the war: on the holy night of the Hollywood calendar, Israeli troops bombed the Palestinian city of Rafah and took control of the city's crossing point on the Gaza side. Ironically, even though none of her looks were dedicated to political statements, the Met Gala became the symbol of the very controversy it very attentively tried to escape.

Back in 2013, model Abby Lee Kershaw showed up at the Met Gala, that year titled Punk: Chaos to Couture, in a silver Rag & Bone slip dress with "Gun Control" written on her stomach; in 2021, Cara Delevingne tried to emulate her audacity with a Dior bustier bearing the phrase "Peg The Patriarchy," and Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wore the "Tax The Rich" dress - that year the exhibition was dedicated to American fashion. While Kershaw's outfit is remembered every May as "the only true punk look of that year," O.C. and Delevingne's stylistic choices met a rather dramatic end, devoured by internet meme culture. This may be the reason why this year there were no political statements on the museum's red carpet, and none of the attendees decided to voice their opinion on current affairs. The Cut ironically noted that this year's theme couldn't have been more appropriate, as Ballard's work, as Literary Hub indicates, tells of the "inevitable ruin of the aristocracy". According to Anna Wintour's standards, the evening was a success: to avoid unwanted surprises, Condé Nast reached an agreement with the Union representing hundreds of its workers a few hours before the event, promising salary increases, eight weeks of severance pay, fourteen weeks of parental leave, and other protections. The edition was not dedicated to John Galliano as initially intended, but there were enough Maison Margiela looks and just as many archive dresses from the enfant terrible, the former creative director of Dior. Of course, the event's TikTok lives (last night's sponsor) were sometimes "disturbed" by the outcries of protesters marching outside the Met with keffiyehs and Palestinian flags, but there were enough police officers and barricades to stop them. Everything, for the first few hours of the Met Gala, went according to plan. Then social media erupted with rage.

The Met hosted a veritable idyllic garden for charity in support of the arts, and it's believed to have been a record year for the institution's revenues: according to the New York Times, the price of a seat at Wintour's dinner this year rose from $50,000 to $75,000, thus it's expected that the overall profit of the Met Gala 2024 was $33 million, compared to $22 million in 2023. If, to stay in line with the last year's captain trend, Condé Nast wanted to silence any dissent outside the haute couture chorus to fully devote itself to quiet luxury, it succeeded to do so initially. It quelled the discontent of employees who until a few hours earlier were on strike, and could rely on the New York armed forces to keep the screams of protesters who were protesting U.S. support for Israel's attacks on Gaza at bay, all while the Met raked in a tidy sum from luxury fashion houses. The "flaw" that made the museum a fertile ground for controversy was precisely its silence, impossible to translate into memes on social media. Globally, the Met garnered 5.1 million tweets, but the bombings on Rafah 3.6 million, and much of these, as it turned out, commented on the utter indifference of the inauguration guests of Sleeping Beauty: The Garden of Time towards the war. The tardiness of guests on the red carpet last night was mainly because of the protests: "fashionably late" or not, they must have had time to Google what was going on.