In The Hunger Games, the citizens of the Panem Capitol dress for extreme extravagance, with vibrant colors, and avant-garde, “couture” designs to show off as a visual representation of wealth, excess, and detachment from the impoverished Districts. Districts who they consider as beneath them.
Anyway… it was the Met Gala again last night.
The annual peacock parade where billionaires, influencers, and human coat hangers gather on the steps of a museum to be looked at, and to cosplay as “important” while dressed like the aftermath of an industrial incident in a Chinese chandelier factory.
For one night a year, the red carpet becomes a zoological exhibit of one species on Earth: the hyper-wealthy attention addict, plumaged in haute couture and sustained entirely by camera flashes and the faint scent of their own PR.
They arrive swaddled in fabrics that cost more than your house, wearing a vague expression that says “I am art, therefore I am!” while looking like a rejected boss level from a mid-budget fantasy video game.
The stated purpose, of course, is to celebrate fashion and raise money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. A museum that isn’t actually open to normos and members of the public at all, probably because we smell.
The Met Gala is a relatively small event, only open to a small number of invited guests – usually around 450.
Tables cost upwards of around $350,000, while individual tickets are reported to go for about $75,000.
Nobody actually pays for their ticket, though. They instead receive invitations from fashion brands, many of whom host celebrities as their guests.
The actual purpose is to give people with too much money and too little self-awareness an excuse to dress like deranged wedding cakes and call it commentary.
The dress code for the gala it’s year is Fashion Is Art, with guests invited to:
”…explore their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and celebrate depictions of the dressed body throughout art history….”
Imagine the meetings to come up with that theme? A room full of so-called professionals and nobody raised their hand and asked if anyone else realised that this is all bullshit… for cunts.
Sam Smith has come dressed as a cancerous lung. So challenging.
Every outfit is accompanied by a paragraph of tortured explanation that reads like it was generated by an AI trained exclusively on museum plaques and Instagram captions:
“This piece interrogates the tension between fragility and permanence.”
No, it interrogates the delta between your self-worth and your actual worth to society when the lights go out. Then it’s just fancy food wrapping.
Hovering over it all like a fashion-themed Bond villain is Anna Wintour, encased behind her comically large sunglasses, the self-appointed empress of taste.
She sits there like a stone gargoyle of Vogue, silently judging the proceedings she herself orchestrated, as if she’s not the one who invited a parade of sequined catastrophes to clog up the steps.
Her authority extends precisely as far as hemlines and shoe choices, yet she carries herself like the Supreme Court of Aesthetics.
If a sentient handbag could rule a small nation as a dictatorship, it would be her.
The irony is exquisite: this entire circus exists to fund a museum collection that most of the public will never meaningfully see, while the masses are left outside gawping at celebrities dressed like sentient curtains.
It’s philanthropy from the provate jet class who lecture you about climate change.
The dazzling array of professional self-promoters, legacy nepo-royalty, and brand ambassadors whose primary skill is standing still while wearing something impractical pour forth.
These are people who refer to being photographed as “work,” who speak in a dialect of curated authenticity, and who treat basic human activities like they’re performance art.
Watching them attempt to navigate stairs in outfits that resemble architectural installations is the closest thing we have to a live-action slapstick revival.
Every year, someone inevitably shows up wearing something so aggressively conceptual it looks like they lost a bet.
Another arrives encased in latex, gasping politely for oxygen while insisting it’s “liberating.” Someone else is draped in enough feathers to trigger an avian migration.
And all of them stand there, nodding gravely, as if the fate of civilization hinges on whether that cape is ironic.
The commentary is just as absurd. Fashion pundits speak in reverent tones about “risk” and “boundary-pushing,” as though wearing a lampshade on your head is a courageous act rather than the logical endpoint of too much money and not enough friends who will tell you that you look like a fucking dick.
Social media erupts with takes, think pieces, and slow-motion videos of people turning around dramatically, which is apparently now a cultural milestone.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there, actual people are living actual lives, blissfully unaware that a minor celebrity just spent six hours getting fitted into a dress that makes them look like.haunted sofa.
The disconnect is so vast it might as well be measured in light-years. This is not a world adjacent to reality; it is a theme park built on top of it, staffed by mannequins who learned to speak in lightweight platitudes.
A circus of absurd spunk trumpets and hoofwanking bunglecunts whose real importance to humanity can be measured in microns.
In the end, the Met Gala isn’t about fashion, or art, or even charity.
It’s about spectacle—pure, uncut, diamanté-encrusted spectacle. It’s a reminder that when you give a certain kind of person unlimited resources and a spotlight, they will not build anything meaningful.
They will, however, absolutely show up dressed like a cunt and insist it’s a statement.
And we, the audience, are left to do the only sensible thing: point, laugh, and marvel at the sheer audacity of it all.
