Randomly woke up too early for work and my first two meetings were canceled, so I wanna talk shit on the internet for a minute before I go find a fancy breakfast sandwich. This is not a pro or anti Met Gala post because while we’re all suffering under the weight of billionaire greed, it doesn’t make any sense to be passionately one way or the other about rich people dressing up and eating nasty food at a party while they smoke cigarettes with each other in the bathroom. These are just random thoughts and a little pushback against misinformation.
The Met Gala is a fundraiser.
I’m not sure why we have to repeat this every year other than the fact that 1) nobody can read 2) nobody can retain information and 3) nobody will look up anything anymore. But the Met Gala is still a fundraiser. It is the primary way that the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes its money every year. I love the concept and I love the museum. NYC has some of the best museums in the world and any fundraiser that can make art free and accessible to a wider number of people is a net good for a humanity. If we had more exposure to the arts we would have fewer billionaires trying to monetize all of our human interactions and outsource creativity to binary code.
However! We wouldn’t need fundraisers for the arts if billionaires would pay their fair share of taxes and politicians saw the value in arts funding over war funding.
Anna Wintour is a disappointment.
I had a cute little giggle over her interview with Meryl Streep where Meryl decided to take sideswipes at Melania. The two of them were making comments on other public figures (Michelle Obama and Mayor Mamdani’s wife both got glowing remarks) and Anna said Melania always looks like herself, which is an old school, nasty read. Back in 2019 while she was still the editor-in-chief, Anna also talked about how Melania would never get a Vogue cover and how important it was for real journalism to take a stand during this era of fake news.
Unfortunately, this led me to believe that Anna Wintour had principles and I had totally forgotten that she had allowed Jeff Bezos to be the largest individual sponsor of the Met Gala to the tune of $10 million. I subscribe to Vogue but I don’t think about Anna all that much. There were rumors last year that Jeff Bezos was going to buy Conde Nast for his wife because Lauren wanted to get serious about fashion. And then Lauren popped up as the cover for a digital issue of the magazine. Those rumors were put to rest, but The Bezi are still clearly sniffing around the edges of the industry looking for a way in, and a $10 million check to the Met Gala is a good way to get your foot in the door.
The Met Gala does not have any problem raising money though. Celebrities line up every year to write that fat $100,000 check to attend the most glamorous party of the year, so it’s just annoying to have his big bald head participating.
Lauren Sanchez cannot dress.
Law Roach helped turned Zendaya into a star. Lauren got Law Roach as her stylist and he decided not to turn down that check. I felt vindicated in never having been a fan of Law Roach as a person. And I feel great about the fact that Lauren Sanchez still looks like a cheap blow up doll.
The synergy between Zendaya and Law rests upon the trust she put in him to dress her appropriately. The client has to have a certain streak of fearlessness. Cardi B’s trust in Kollin Carter is another great example of that trust. Lauren Sanchez does not trust Law Roach and she only hired him for the name recognition and the fashion clout. She still ends up wearing the same dress she always wears — tight and plasticky. Last night you could see the vision on full display .
Law Roach was going in a Madame X direction and Lauren clearly said she wanted her hair long and sexy. She wanted the dress tighter. She wanted the corset more cinched. Because Lauren Sanchez is not interested in wearing fashion — she’s just interested in looking sexy and that’s why she will never be That Girl. She will always just look a cheap mess.
The fashions did not hit.
I’m glad Zendaya was not at the Amazon Ball. Cardi and Janelle Monae were both disappointing. Rihanna had her biggest flop ever at any Met Gala since she’s been attending.
It’s almost like the stars decided the Amazon Ball was not worth bringing out the big guns and nobody turned it out the way they usually do. Of every Met Gala since I’ve been paying attention, this one was the most underwhelming and I love that for them.
Boycotting is fine. Sanctimoniousness is not.
We live in a shithole country with a terrible political system inextricably intertwined with a billionaire class that is trying to kill us. We all have the freedom to pick and choose our battles. I don’t eat Chick Fil A because I feel like my dollar toward mediocre chicken makes its way directly to anti LGBTQ causes. I think it is quite easy to avoid eating a soggy chicken sandwich there because there are so many other options for fast food. If you are choosing to go there, it’s because you are saying your desire for that particular piece of chicken is more important than the harmful destination of your dollar. I feel similarly about Harry Potter and giving money to that transphobe. It’s easy to simply watch a different TV show or play a different video game. R. Kelly and Diddy used the money we gave them for decades to torture women and girls. Don’t give them any more money. Listen to something else.
I’m not going to yell at you for ordering something on Amazon. I would encourage you to do your best to buy local, but I also grew up in a small town where Wal Mart put every other local mom & pop out of business. Three businesses survived Wal Mart on our main highway: the Korean beauty supply store, a sub sandwich shop, and a Bi-Lo grocery store that is still hanging on. Otherwise, we were forced to shop at Wal Mart whether we wanted to or not. There are large swaths of this country where Wal Mart and Amazon are your only options today.
I was listening to a caller on CNN yesterday who was explaining that she only had $65 a month to spend on food after this administration’s cuts. If she has to choose between a $3 gallon of milk on Amazon and a $5 gallon of milk local, I’m not going to tell her to buy local because Jeff Bezos is a shitty person who doesn’t pay taxes and runs a company that forces his employees to get on food stamps to make ends meet while he’s worth more money than god.
So you want to boycott the Met Gala? Fine. I don’t know what your boycott consists of because it’s not like you had the check to buy yourself a ticket anyway, but if you want to pay no attention to it, by calling attention to the fact that you’re not going to pay attention to it, then so be it. A lot of people got a check last night though. The florists, the caterers, the hair dressers, the makeup artists. Even the housekeeping lady at the hotel bringing extra towels got a nice tip last night. They were all looking forward to that check and the opportunity to make connections that could get them a bigger check in the future. The Costume Institute is funded and you can still go for free. Designers who are still on the come up had one of the most high-profile spots you can land (did y’all see Sarah Paulson in Matieres Fecales? Gorg!).
We pick and choose. We can’t avoid everything. We weigh the pros and cons. I think the economic and artistic impact of the Met Gala outweighs the check that Temu Lex Luthor wrote. I can still be disappointed that his check was accepted. It doesn’t have to be all in or all out. We can criticize and still participate. We can giggle that the fashions were flopping and still support the overall goal of rich people parting with their money to help fund a museum.
And today is a new day. The global conflicts that existed Sunday still exist today. They didn’t get worse yesterday because some random people on the internet took a break from monitoring them every second to look at some (questionable) fashions on celebrities.
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