Glamour and a glug of madness
TIt’s like Wearable Arts and the Oscars had a kid.
he Met Gala Ball. Every year I’d follow it, just down the road from my apartment in New York City. Fifteen minutes at a brisk jaywalk along Fifth Ave, across the invisible line dividing the bowels of Spanish Harlem from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. So close/so far, etc. In five years I never quite managed an invite nor the $40,000 price of a personal ticket.
Please! I don’t mean to generalise, but if I can tend any advice to my fellow beer-guzzling-and-rugbyloving-steel-capped-$10-buzzcut-noappointment-necessary-I’ll-have-thesteak-cooked-rare-cos-I-love-bloodfashionless contemporaries, take 15 minutes and check those Gala photos. astonished by the physics and engineering, audacity and child-like creative expression of some outfits.
Unlike the Oscars, where everyone tries to look good, New York’s big annual celebrity bash mixes glamorous people with a big old slug of madness. It’s what I imagine a good hallucination might feel like.
Oh look! Here’s Rihanna in a dress that looks like one of those honeycomb crepe paper birthday party decorations no one has the patience to unravel as nicely as the photo on the packet.
Oh look! Jaden Smith has shaved off his dreadlocks and is posing with his discarded hair. “It’s my date!”
Puff Daddy is lying on the red carpet stairs. Does he have a hernia? Does that man need help? Stand down! It’s a look. I think I get it, Diddy.
Katy Perry arrives in a big red dress and a head veil with the word “witness” shaped out of little pipe cleaners and shiny things. She has a little mirror coming out of each side of her head like the side mirrors on my Corolla, facing the wrong way.
Solange Knowles arrives in a puffer jacket just like you’d buy at Kathmandu, except this one must be almost 3m long.
A woman named Helen Lasichanh wears a cubic outfit, which some fashion bloggers call visionary and others cruelly if somewhat accurately compare to Po, the fourth Teletubby.
Don’t mistake me, I’m not being facetious. The Met Gala, even for the uninitiated and cultureless, makes for a fascinating orgy of fame, power, and artistic expression.
It’s like Wearable Arts and the Oscars had a kid. It’s the anti-bland. And if you do get lost in the millions of photos for a few minutes, you’ll note one permeating trend. Nobody is smiling.
●