Overdressed Met Gala avatars
The fashion museum event is not just about fashion. It has turned into a parade for celebs desperate for attention, writes Aspasia Karras
Not everyone was butt naked at the Met Gala, otherwise known as the world’s biggest fancy-dress party, on Monday night. Some invitees were wearing so much that six fully grown men had to be in attendance to move around the material of their outfits along with the women in the centre of each abominable froufrou. I’m talking to you Cardi B and Gigi Hadid — or manoeuvre about the six types of sand, yes, you Tyla!
Picking them up like brittle dolls, carrying the oceans of material, rearranging it at their feet like so many obedient footmen — so that these avatars could manifest on the red carpet
— or in this instance a semi-green one. I think it was a garden theme!
How do they sit once they get inside the ball? Or does everyone stand at a safe distance, texting each other their small talk, with only the naked people able to move around and actually air kiss?
Some, like Kim K, I imagine had to stand more still than others to conserve what little breath she had left after being manhandled into a corset worthy of a Victorian. Happily her nether regions could breathe freely as attested to by her panty, which was very much in attendance, unlike many others that had been left at home.
An avatar is an embodiment of a deity in ancient Sanskrit.
In the secular world it means the embodiment of an idea. Every time I see this ultimate fashion parade unfolding on a Monday night when it’s a slow burn on the news front (what else happens on a Monday night?) and so more likely to gather up my scattershot attention and keep it focused on this stuff for longer than would seem wholesome or necessary I wonder what idea it is precisely that these women are incarnating?
I mean, why take this stuff seriously at all? What is even the point of this Venn diagram where fashion meets celebrity? I refer to the incensed TikTokkers and protesters who took to the streets outside the Metropolitan Museum in New York, decrying the horrors of paying attention to this fashion circus as per normal while people are dying in Gaza.
They seemed less concerned about the people dying in the Ukraine or Myanmar or Yemen, but still. How, they howled in highminded disbelief, could attention be focused on this side show when so many terrible and serious things are happening in the world? Shame on us all!
And yet every “serious” news media outlet in the world repeated the pictures from Monday and for the rest of the week with lists and reviews and thought pieces about what these sartorial decisions meant, as if these confections and flights of fancy have a direct bearing on our thoughts and lives.
They also ran stories about the people who did not attend, like Katy Perry, who nevertheless had her moment in front of the phalanx of flash photography by way of several fake AI versions.
The fake AI version even convinced her mother she was there and just switching out outfits like Zendaya, who changed twice and posed in front of the museum as if she were deep in a Belle Epoque fever dream, caught making her escape from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting up in an impressionist gallery.
Emily Ratajkowski, who was firmly in the “less is more” brigade as the night progressed, has, in fact, considered the avatar question in depth. It’s always useful to get feedback from the horse’s mouth.
In this case she wrote a well-reviewed book called My Body, in which she tries to unravel the tightly-wound skein of competing interests that brought her to this place where she finds herself standing on a semi-green carpet almost entirely naked on a Monday with millions of eyes gazing critically upon her perfect form — considering what she means — and it’s not the stuff of her worst nightmares. She actually does it willingly while ostensibly awake and, what’s more, countless wannabes would gladly swap places with her and consider this the apotheosis of all their dreams and the fulfilment of their lifelong wishes.
She writes: “I’ve felt objectified and limited by my position in the world as a so-called ‘sex symbol’.I’ve capitalised on my body within the confines of a cis-hetero, capitalist, patriarchal world, one in which beauty and sex appeal are valued solely through the satisfaction of the male gaze.
“I think of her and the other naked women who line the walls and fill the halls of museums, some so ancient that the colour has washed from their bodies and their marble heads have fallen off. It would be easy to mistake these displays for symbols of respect, for an honour. But what were their lives? And what were their names? No-one remembers.”
I don’t know if she comes to a satisfactory conclusion in the book, she is of her body — and her mind has chosen to play this game (really effectively). All these avatars are selling something and behind these apparitions there’s a mammoth industrial complex turning a stiff profit.
There’s no secret to that. But as I gaze at them I can’t help but hear a plaintiff existential plea playing out on that semigreen carpet. The avatars flicker briefly into view — insanely beautiful women adorned in madcap finery or in their bare, naked skins all asking for some attention, wanting to be seen: look at me, look at me and please remember my name.