A festival of tone-deaf excess
The Met Gala has not changed – neither has the nature of celebrity
The Met Gala, the “Oscars of fashion”, is known for its “tone-deaf” celebration of excess, says Catherine Bennett in The Guardian. This year’s event continued the tradition by celebrating the “gilded age”, the period in 19th-century American history when wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few families. Plus ça change. Reality TV star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian made waves at this year’s event by squeezing into the dress Marilyn Monroe first wore when she sang Happy Birthday, Mr President to John F. Kennedy in 1962.
That Kardashian should presume to put herself on the same level as that cultural icon enraged some. Museum curators and fashion historians were left similarly aghast by the “idiocy” of the decision to put “celebrity before preserving cultural heritage – the ostensible point of the event”. Monroe’s “fragile, beaded dress” is now six decades old. It needs to be protected from perspiration, sunlight, temperature changes and humidity to preserve it. As it was, it was as if the V&A had invited the entire panel of
Britain’s Got Talent to a night in the Great Bed of Ware for a publicity stunt. And if Kardashian can causally slip on Monroe’s dress for a celebrity bash, what’s to stop others raiding historic costume collections and doing the same?
Kim is the new Marilyn
The reality is not quite so outrageous, however, says Racquel Gates on CNN. Kardashian only wore the actual dress for a few minutes on the carpet before changing into a replica. And it’s not as if there were no precedent for such a display – museums and private collectors have exhibited vintage or archival pieces on celebrities and models before “in creative but potentially risky ways”.
If Kardashian had taken the dress from an actual museum then maybe her critics would have a point, says Heather Schwedel on Slate. The dress was, however, on loan from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not theme park in Orlando, Florida. You could argue that letting Kardashian wear the dress was “a sound business decision” by the park – it “may even be more valuable now”, thanks to all the publicity. Ripley’s is already proudly boasting that Kardashian has “added to the pop-culture significance of Monroe’s iconic dress” and has promised to move it to the park’s other location in Hollywood.
It is plausible that this should boost its value. The dress’s association with celebrity had, after all, already caused its price to rocket from the $1,440 that Monroe originally paid for it in 1962 to the $1.26m that it raised at auction in 1999, which in turn rose to $4.8m in 2016, says Laura Craik in The Daily Telegraph. Besides, what could be more appropriate than that Monroe’s dress should now adorn her modern equivalent? Far from being outraged, she would have appreciated that the dress should now adorn someone with, like her, “an innate talent for going viral”, “an incorrigible meme queen” who “has been both fame’s benefactor and its victim”. Kardashian’s wearing of that dress is a “sartorial tribute… from a fan who understands more about fame than most”.
“The price of the dress has rocketed from the $1,440 that Monroe paid for it in 1962 to $4.8m”