Art Protesting Met Gala Better Than Art At Met Gala
The 'Ball Without Billionaires' was a smash hit.
This year, everyone feels pretty gross about the Met Gala.
Well, people feel some kind of way about the Met Gala most years, its ostentatious displays of wealth and the occasional destruction of historically significant Marilyn Monroe dresses. I’m usually a fan, because despite my anti-capitalist leanings, I’m just not that mad at weird fashion that people get paid a fair wage to make or at fundraising for the arts, especially for something as important as the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute — but this year even I’ve got the ick. Why? Because the event was “co-hosted” by Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who reportedly donated $10 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the privilege.
As much as I’d love to cheer for the Met getting $10 million at a time when public funding for the arts is scarce (thanks, in part, to the Trump administration’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts), it’s hard to get too jazzed about it when Bezos is working people at Amazon to death, contracting with ICE, purging the Washington Post of quality journalists and turning its opinion section into the National Review, and spending $75 million on Melania Trump vanity projects. It’s also clear that the Bezoses are sponsoring the event to raise their profile and establish themselves as “cool” tastemakers (along with recent appearances at several fashion shows), as several other tech bros have been attempting to do as of late. In response, groups like Everybody Hates Elon protested the event and more than a few celebrities chose to sit it out (several while pointedly liking and commenting on social media posts criticizing the event and the Bezoses).
“There’s a thin line between celebrating glamorous fashion and artwashing extreme wealth, and that line gets bulldozed when your poster boy is an ICE-profiteering billionaire bankrolling Trump’s vanity projects and a top spender on anti-worker lobbying,” said Alex Cobham, chief executive at the Tax Justice Network, which just this week published an analysis finding that a 2 percent tax on just three of the necklaces worn by Met Gala attendees could “fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance programme.”
A lot has been made of Lauren Sánchez Bezos wearing a Schiaparelli dress based on John Singer Sargent’s controversial (at the time) masterpiece Madame X, supposedly as a nod to the controversy of the Bezos-sponsored Met Gala. Except, you know, Madame X was controversial because of a slipped shoulder strap and the Bezos-sponsored Met Gala was controversial because of how Jeff Bezos is a labor-exploiting, Trump-ass-kissing billionaire who doesn’t think he should have to pay taxes.
First of all, the dress, designed by Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry, was tacky as hell (though that could have been due to Sánchez Bezos’s insistence that it be “body conscious”), and I say this as a major Schiaparelli fangirl. Second, while Sánchez Bezos says she chose Schiaparelli on purpose because Elsa Schiaparelli saw fashion as art and this year’s theme was “Fashion Is Art,” she was also a fierce anti-fascist and likely would not have been too keen on being associated with Trump allies like Jeff Bezos.
Fashion absolutely is art, but so are a lot of things. In fact, people got pretty creative with the ways they protested the event. Everybody Hates Elon hid over 100 bottles of “urine” throughout the Met — in reference to the bottles that Amazon delivery drivers are forced to pee in because they can’t take a minute to stop to use a regular bathroom.
The group made another reference to the infamous Amazon pee bottles outside the event — a shopping cart filled with plastic bottles, labeled “Met Gala VIP Toilet,” reading “Installed in honor of Met Gala chair Jeff Bezos. Go ahead, it’s good enough for its staff.”
And in the run-up to the event, they projected interviews with Amazon workers on the billionaire’s penthouse.
However, probably the best counter to the event was the joyous “Ball Without Billionaires” hosted by a coalition of labor groups, which featured workers of all sizes and genders from Amazon, Whole Foods, Washington Post, Starbucks, and Uber walking the runway in outfits from immigrant designers, voguing dancers, and the fabulous Lisa Ann Walker calling Jeff Bezos “Temu Lex Luthor.”
“They can try to take our rights,” said SEIU President April Verrett. “They can try to redraw the lines. They can try to control the systems. But they will never, ever be able to replicate the brilliance, the creativity, the resilience of the people they are trying to hold down. So this ball without billionaires is not just about fashion. It is about power. It’s about telling the truth that people who sew and care and drive and cook and clean and secure and those that create are the ones who make everything possible. Labor is art.”
The event was hosted by Verret, Walter (who plays the very pro-union Melissa Schemmenti on Abbott Elementary), and fashion editor and stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. Karefa-Johnson, you should know, is a pretty big deal in fashion and was the first Black woman to style a Vogue cover … in 2021.
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Throughout the event, as each worker walked the runway, the hosts told their story — stories of how they were mistreated at their jobs, how they worked to change things and improve the system for themselves and their co-workers, and how they see labor and art as interconnected.
Jeff Bezos is dropping $10 million on the Met (which I guess would be like $20 to you or me) because his wife wants to be a hip fashionista and because they both want to be culturally relevant. Also because it’s a tax write-off. He’s not doing it out of any great love of the arts or because he feels an obligation, as someone who has been so fortunate, to pay it forward and improve things for the rest of us. He could give two shits about what any of those workers have been through and has, instead, tirelessly fought against their efforts to form unions that would improve their conditions, because it’s just so much more important to him to be worth $224 billion.
The grand irony here is that he doesn’t look cool, his wife doesn’t look fashionable, and more attention than ever is being paid to the bad shit that Amazon does and that he does on his own. That’s why that, and not his wife’s hideous gown, Katy Perry dressing like a fencer from the year 3000, Cardi B’s Marc Jacobs tumor bodysuit, however late Rihanna was this time (she’s allowed, it’s a thing) or even a basically naked Doja Cat was the real story of this year’s Met Gala.
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I am on the second floor, I have a nice little balcony. I live on a fairly busy street with people and cars.
People walk by my building and don't notice me at first, I am not that high off the ground. I have startled a few people.
Yesterday a woman was walking by and she had this big ice cream sundae, she took a huge bite and looked up, she kinda looked embarrassed, I yelled out, it looks delicious!
She said it is!
Then she entered the building next to mine and that is how you meet your neighbors.
Cat or black hole?
Maybe a chocolate donut.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-254028430?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc