The first Monday in May has long been the highest wattage night on the international fashion calendar. The Met Gala is where celebrities vie to out-fabulous each other on the carpeted steps in aid of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. See: Rihanna in the spectacular egg yolk-yellow dress and train by Guo Pei in 2015; Kim Kardashian unearthing Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday Mr. President” dress in 2022; Zendaya wearing not one but two archival looks designed by John Galliano for Maison Margiela and Givenchy respectively in 2024.
But this year has seen a major disruption in the fashion continuum. Billionaire Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos are lead sponsors and honorary chairs underwriting the whole event. This has resulted in both eat-the-rich protests and critics suggesting this once-exclusive arena of immaculate taste should be renamed the Tech Gala.
The Met Gala guest list was once ultra-rarified; Vogue’s imperious editor Anna Wintour gave all prospective attendees the nod or the axe, and was even said to approve all wardrobe selections. The new blood, however rich, seems certain to dilute the cool factor of the event.
Eat-the-rich protests
Last summer, when Bezos bought out Venice for the couple’s lavish wedding, anti-billionaire group Everyone Hates Elon placed a giant banner smack in the middle of Piazza San Marco reading: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”
The same activists have been busy plastering New York City with “boycott the Met Gala” posters that read: “Brought to you by the firm that powers ICE.” On Instagram, the group posted this message: “Jeff thinks if he poses with A-listers the world will forget he avoids tax and supports Trump.”
Fashion labels, which used to be the Met Gala’s primary sponsors, are still big business, but peanuts compared to tech revenues. Over the past few years, Wintour has been steadily courting Silicon Valley money, an OpenAI, Meta and Snapchat have reportedly bought tables this year. Elon Musk has attended twice in the past. Speculation is high that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg will be there this year, considering his front-row appearance at Prada’s Milan Fashion Week show this spring, marking a notable shift away from his long-term commitment to grey T-shirts.
These titans are no doubt drawn by the prospect of mingling with celebrity guests including co-chairs Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Zoë Kravitz, Teyana Taylor and Sam Smith.
While former N.Y.C. mayors Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams have attended the gala, one notable RSVP decline came from the city’s current progressive mayor Zohran Mamdani, who announced he instead wanted to focus on “making the most expensive city in the United States affordable.”
Anna Wintour’s legacy
Mamdani is right, the Met Gala does not scream affordability. The individual ticket price is now $100,000 USD, up from $75,000 last year, while the price per table has held at $350,000. Last year, the event raised $31 million USD for the Costume Institute, which relies on the funding for exhibitions, operations, acquisitions and publications. That is nothing to a billionaire.
Wintour is a longtime supporter of Democratic candidates and causes, but her championship of the Bezoses threatens to tarnish her legacy. Certainly, their tasteless displays of extreme wealth are a mismatch for the carefully curated esthetic Wintour has meticulously controlled at the Met Gala since 1995.
As Wintour’s biographer Amy Odell wrote in her newsletter “Back Row” this week, the Bezoses’ “primary esthetic is tackiness” and “tackiness’s favourite bedfellow, obliviousness.” Then there’s the couple’s high-profile attendance at Donald Trump’s second inauguration (Sanchez Bezos clad in a flashbulb-poppingly low-cut suit); Amazon’s funding of the first lady’s widely derided “Melania” vanity documentary; the company’s egregious treatment of workers and vast environmental footprint; their Blue Origin celebrity jaunt to space; and Bezos’ scandalously low tax rate.
The Bezoses’ PR tour
The Bezoses are out to spit-shine their image, and fashion cred via Wintour’s seal of approval can apparently now be bought. The spoils: the Met Gala co-chairmanship, along with glowing reporting on their wedding in the pages of Vogue, complete with a digital cover shoot for Sanchez Bezos, clad in a white gown.
Another attempt comes with this week’s fashion greenwashing: the Bezos Earth Fund pledged $34 million USD to institutions studying alternatives to cotton and polyester, fabrics that take a heavy toll on environmental resources. “When you start asking questions about what clothes could be made of, the answers are incredible,” Sanchez Bezos told the Wall Street Journal. “We’re investing in the scientists changing what fabric is actually made from. The future of fashion is being invented right now.” So, too, is the future of philanthropy and fashion’s foremost red carpet.
Criticism of the Met Gala is not new, however. In 2021, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez attended wearing a white dress with Tax the Rich scrawled across the back in red. Last year, hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters made it within a block of the venue.
Even before the tech billionaires came on board, the gala has drawn more negative attention than most society fundraisers or red carpet events. No one jumps on celebrities for wearing $100,000 custom gowns to film premieres or the Oscars. But then, everyone can go to the movies. The Met Ball sticks in the collective craw as a symbol of income inequality because of haute couture’s haughtiness.
Another wrinkle in this year’s roll out is the Costume Institute exhibition’s theme. Titled “Costume Art,” it encompasses “the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” as curator Andrew Bolton told the media. Subcategories include the naked body, the classical body, the pregnant body and the aging body. Hmmm.
While this is celebratory in theory, as the gala’s dress code (technically “Fashion is art”), this will no doubt be interpreted as ways to flaunt the body, an ironic and troubling prospect at a time when both models and celebrities are thinner than ever. In an Ozempic-flooded Hollywood and fashion sphere, the pandemic years of the industry championing diversity and inclusivity are becoming a distant memory.
On the positive side, the Met Gala has been an experimental laboratory for the fashion art form. In this arena, the line between clothing and costume is blurred and boundaries have been pushed, such as the shift in men’s fashion toward creativity and self-expression, banishing boring tuxes to the back of the closet.
But now that tech billionaires and GLP-1 pens are in everyone’s pockets, and activists will be doing their best to throw rotten tomatoes onto the pristine red carpet, the glamour and artistry is inevitably dimmed. Fashion is nothing if not ever-changing — and not always for the better.
