Last year's Met Ball cost around £6 million to stage and raised £22 million. The profits went to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, once a somewhat stuffy institution that even its then curator, Harold Korda, described as a "benign tumor," so overlooked by the Met's loftier, "purer" art departments .
Then in 1995, Anna Wintour came up with a vision - for the Institute, which has since been named after her, but more importantly, for the accompanying company, which has long since overshadowed all the fashion exhibitions the Institute organizes.
In New York you can't argue about money. The Met Ball is becoming less and less about clothes - some guests looked as if they were wearing nothing on Monday night, others were not wearing them in the conventional sense - and more and more about money ("the big brands") and power (of Anna Wintour).
The brands decide whether they want to earn $75,000 for a single ticket and at least $350,000 for a table. And it is Wintour who decides almost everything else. Brands pay; she is okay with who they bring. And they fall in line - usually (in 2014, Madonna posted her first choice for Met outfit on social media, explaining that Wintour turned it down).
The event itself lasts just over an hour - the celebrities arrive in hierarchical order, least to most famous, meaning the A-listers spend less time walking around. A short dinner, a cursory look at the accompanying exhibition and then on to the after parties.
Wintour may be a divisive character, but she is a great businesswoman. "There is not a single act, look or gesture that is not transactional at the Met," a veteran reporter tells me.
Take the invitation from Jeff Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sanchez. Until five minutes ago, the woman was ridiculed by the entire industry - just like the Kardashians were before Wintour finally gave Kim Kardashain a ticket in 2013 after she aligned herself with Kanye West and became too big to ignore. (Kanye isn't allowed these days, by the way).
Wintour, who seems to revel in certain celebrities dressing like fools to encourage clicks, orchestrated Sanchez's fine Oscar de la Renta dress for the evening, setting her up as a viable fashion figure seen. Why? According to New York Magazine She's excited about the idea of Sanchez's husband-to-be, Jeff Bezos, taking over Condé Nast.
Access to the Met equals access to the fashion world, which then turns on the money tap. Brands will court you to become one of their ambassadors. If you are already one, their data extraction programs will scour the Internet to measure how often your photo is used by media outlets to monitor their return on investment.
It's not just actors and musicians who benefit from this. Makeup and hair artists sell the products they use to prep their clients on Instagram in hopes of getting a contract. And boy, there are plenty of products out there (Kim Kardashian told USA). Fashion that she spent 14 hours dying her hair blonde for the 2022 Met Gala). A veteran of several Mets tells me it would take her two days to get ready, "and that was back in the day, before it got so crazy. And I'm not even a celebrity. By the time you get to the eyebrow microblading, to the fake tanning, to the $3,000 facials, to the real hair and makeup, it's already been 48 hours."
That's a gross underestimate if you're also looking to lose some weight, although Ozempic has refined that side of things considerably. (If TikTok, once a sponsor of Met Ball, is banned in the US, how long will it be before Ozempic is invited to become a co-sponsor?). For that same ball that required all that peroxide, Kim Kardashian lost 21 pounds by squeezing into a beaded Bob Mackie dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to serenade JFK in 1962. Kardashian was only at the ball for about twenty minutes. That's not the point. The photos went viral. Their pixels will probably still be shaking when everything else is dust.
You can't say KK isn't committed to pleasing Wintour. There are reports that she struggled to breathe in this year's look: a tiny fitted Margiela dress. Tyla, a South African singer, had to be carried up the stairs by several bodyguards because her 'sand sculpture' Perspex Balmain dress lacked the ease of LuluLemon. At least she's being talked about.
If this doesn't sound like much fun, then it isn't meant to be. Amy Schumer once said that the whole affair "felt like a punishment." Gwyneth Paltrow was also not a fan and said in 2013 that she would no longer be there. But in 2019, there she was. Sometimes a celebrity has to be there, if only to prove to themselves that they still exist.
This year's sponsors must hope that no one now doubts their existence. Loewe, helmed by Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson, was the headliner, dressing a number of celebrities and taking claim to a handful of outfits in the exhibition. It's no coincidence that Anderson also designed the costumes for Challengers - the tennis film starring Josh O'Connor and Zendaya, which is available now and which Zendaya, co-host of the event, is also promoting. It's all connected.
Given Loewe's prominent role in Monday's proceedings, its conglomerate holder, LVMH, had a noticeably quieter event with its other, much larger brands. For example, Louis Vuitton, LVMH's biggest player, didn't even take up a table, and if anyone wore Vuitton on the red carpet, photos have yet to emerge. Chanel also had few sightings - so far only Sofia Coppola. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Debicki was the biggest ambassador for Dior, which had a much bigger win at the Oscars. There were also relatively few Hollywood stars, amid speculation that the protests at Columbia University, which spread into some streets, were a deterrent factor.
Others have noted that while the Challengers the planning was perfect, the overall timing of this paean to excess is so wrong as to border on satire. It is not just the situation in Gaza. Closer to home, Condé Nast USA is locked in bitter negotiations with its unionized workforce as it negotiates payouts and proposed layoffs. Late last year, Anne Hathaway walked away from a shoot for Vanity fair, in an apparent show of sympathy for the union. Perhaps other celebrities did not want to be caught in the middle of a potential hurricane of moral outrage from others, one organized by a publishing house that was increasingly seen as "problematic."
Yet somehow an insider tells me, "No one wants to oust Anna. This really skinny white woman stands there judging everyone and no one ever questions it." Amy Odell, who wrote Anna: The biography (2022) estimates that Wintour approves of 80 percent of the looks that appear on the red (or this year, greenish) carpet at The Met Ball. Celebrities are happy to go along, because studios only pay for stylists if they have a movie to offer. So if AW wants to police your appearance, fine. She may not do it personally, but you will get one Fashion stylist to help you connect with today's important brands and bring it all together.
Who decides who the important brands are? It's 100 percent Wintour's show. If you're wondering why a small label like Erdem or Harris Reed is featured, it's because Wintour is a fan. That's why Chloé dressed five celebrities who moved as one all night (the clothes looked better grouped than whey single would have); why Balenciaga was featured on several major celebrities (Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts) when so many people don't want to touch it because of its association with a child sexualization scandal in 2022... it's all Wintour's will.
The same goes for John Galliano, who has largely kept a low profile since his anti-Semitic comments in 2010. Wintour is determined in every respect to professionally rehabilitate Galliano. Zendaya wore vintage Galliano from one of his Dior collections. The rapper Bad Bunny recently wore Maison Margiela, the brand Galliano now designs for, including some furry fashion items that some liken to a doormat. (I wonder if Galliano realized it looked a bit like an Orthodox rabbi's hat?)
Wintour wants to promote Galliano so badly, according to him New York Magazine, she wanted this entire exhibition to be dedicated to him. She can be powerful. But sensitivities to current events are not her strong point. This, along with a lack of top players and an abundance of nepobabies, will inevitably spark conversations about how that power is used.
