By Sianna Zewdie (Y12)
Disclaimer: My fashion credentials are limited to having watched TikTok reviews of the event and three (3) viewings of The Devil Wears Prada (I regretfully have not yet had the chance to watch the second film). Thus, take my commentary with a grain of salt. Actually, better make it a whole shaker.
Every year, I know it’s the Met Gala, not because I’ve been invited (tragically) but because my TikTok FYP undergoes a dramatic transformation. One moment it’s AI slop, biting political commentary, and recycled memes. The next: an avalanche of sequins and feathers while people comment ‘she understood the assignment’ or ‘go girl give us nothing!’. This year’s dress code: Fashion Is Art. Which is the most overpriced tautology ever devised: Fashion. Is. Art. Groundbreaking. Someone alert the Nobel committee.
You know the drill—you’ve seen the wannabe fashion commentators on TikTok. Let’s get into the main event.
But First: Let Me Ruin the Fun
Or rather, let me begin it, if recreational cynicism is your idea of a good time. Let’s start off by talking about what the Met Gala actually is, because ‘fashion’s biggest night’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a description.
The Met Gala is a fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which sounds fancy, but if you really think about it, it’s just a museum’s clothing department. This is the cause. Costume preservation. At a museum in Manhattan. While we raise money for that, 2.33 billion people worldwide are food-insecure. Thousands of people died this week in conflicts that many of the attendees’ governments are actively funding. It wouldn’t be too hyperbolic to say that the planet right now is on fire.
But the outfits, though.
Every time someone raises this—and people do, every year like clockwork—the response comes back: it’s a charity event. And, yes, it is. Technically. This year, it raised a record-breaking $42 million—a genuinely large number, until you remember that Jeff Bezos, who co-sponsored the event, is worth approximately $275 billion. He could fund sixty Met Galas and not notice—and that is a conservative estimate. His wedding cost more than what the Gala raised.
So, forgive me if I don’t find the generosity argument particularly exonerating. Charity, when deployed as aesthetic, is not charity at all; rather, it’s a cover charge. It is the precise mechanism that enables the extraordinarily wealthy to launder spectacle into virtue—and we eat it up! The dress isn’t excess, it’s art. The party isn’t a parade of oligarchs, it’s philanthropy.
I’m not saying that the people who attended are (necessarily) evil. What I am saying is that a civilization that raises millions for costume conservation while people die of preventable diseases cares more about the optics of generosity rather than the scale of it. This is not a put-down of the arts; far from it. What it is is a critique of society’s willingness to place aesthetics on a pedestal but shy away from genuine accountability and systemic change.
Now that I’ve killed the buzz, we can move on to the outfits. One slight problem—I have a History test on Thursday, a Math test on Friday, Chemistry next week, and a whole host of end-of-year exams breathing down my neck that I haven’t exactly begun studying for. So, you’re going to speedrun this with me. This is going to be fun.
EXHIBIT A THROUGH WHATEVER
Madonna arrived in Saint Laurent inspired by the Temptation of St. Anthony, a medieval allegory about demonic visions, spiritual torment, and resisting sin—a totally normal theme to choose in May. The pirate hat, the trumpet, the women in blindfolds—apparently, all of it makes sense if you know your 15th-century religious iconography, which evidently Madonna does. Unfortunately for me, the HL History syllabus doesn’t go further back than mid-1800s Russia.
Verdict: I know it was cool and she pulled it off, but really, I felt like someone whose Halloween decorations only arrived in mid-May.
Gwendoline Christie is 6’3 and wore a voluminous red gown, which would have been sufficient on its own, but she paired it with a mask of her own face. There’s something very confident about deciding that your face is the best possible accessory, and also that one of them simply isn’t enough.
Verdict: Frankly, if I looked like an unearthly goddess, I’d carry a spare face too.
Bad Bunny did not come to the Met Gala. A seventy-something-year-old man in Zara did. He had gray hair. He had a cane. He had the deep-set wrinkles of someone who has Seen Things. He was also, according to his outfit, available in sizes XS to XXL with free returns. Somewhere in the world, a millennial woman watched this and felt vindicated about every fashion choice she has ever made (with a brief recession to mourn his prosthetic ageing)
Verdict: He spent hours in a makeup chair getting aged into a Zara customer. Method acting at its most harrowing.
Doja Cat turned up in a monochromatic nude latex Saint Laurent gown. Minimal. Sleek. Restrained. This is the same woman who spent a previous Met Gala in full cat prosthetics and conducted an interview entirely in meows. She’s become normal now, and it’s either character development or a recession indicator, and I don’t know which worries me more.
Verdict: Somehow more unsettling than the cat.
Beyoncé arrived last night in her first Met Gala appearance since 2016 (a recession indicator?) Her sheer gown traced a diamond skeleton across her body, and her feathered coat had a train long enough to have its own postcode. She brought her husband and Blue Ivy, who is fourteen, which means Blue Ivy’s first Met Gala happened before I’ve even talked to a doctor without my mom next to me, and I’m choosing not to think about that. The skeleton under all those diamonds is either a meditation on mortality and glamor or a woman who has been famous longer than we’ve been born, reminding us that she’ll outlast us.
Verdict: Manifesting this kind of comeback at my ten-year high school reunion.
Kylie Jenner needs to reassess her inner circle, because what real friend would let her walk out the door with those eyebrows? Although she has been famous since she was ten and has never once left the house without a plan, which makes the eyebrows not a mistake but a statement, and the statement is that she can do what she wants, and we’ll talk about it anyway. Which, fair enough, here I am. Sorry guys, I guess I’m not artsy enough for the ‘bleached eyebrows’ fad.
Verdict: A lot of effort to look like zero effort, which may not be the theme of the night, but it seems like the theme of her entire career.
Blake Lively arrived in archival Versace—pastel, Rococo, enormous train, the works — on the same day she settled a lawsuit that had either been a years-long fight for justice, or years-long PR-disaster, depending entirely on which parasocial allegiance you’d declared by November 2024. It was impeccable timing; rather like Nicole Kidman skipping after her divorce from Tom Cruise, except now in couture.
Verdict: When in doubt, distract with Versace and a train long enough to bury the narrative.
Ben Stiller wore a suit and an orange Knicks tie, which is the menswear equivalent of showing up to a five-star restaurant and ordering a Diet Coke. The Knicks are in the playoffs. The Met Gala was on a Monday. Christine Taylor wore Monique Lhullier and looked radiant, while Ben Stiller wore the tie of a man who negotiated down from not going, and this was his consolation prize.
Verdict: He is basically every man, at every event, being dragged there by his girlfriend/wife/significant other.
Heidi Klum.
Verdict: A picture paints a thousand words, and that picture tops any joke I could make, I fear.
And there we have it. The Met Gala. A party for the extraordinarily wealthy, justified by a charitable contribution that wouldn’t cover three hours of Jeff Bezos’ passive income, with attendees ranging from the transcendent to the inexplicable. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to study World War One, which also involved a lot of very wealthy people in expensive clothes while the world burned around them. It’s as they say, I suppose—life imitates art.