Jeff Bezos's Met Gala reared its hideous but expensively face-lifted head Monday night, and it was, as Anna Wintour biographer Amy Odell put it, "all money, no soul."
While the Met Gala is ostensibly about showcasing the craft of couture—a tentpole fashion event under the tutelage of Condé Nast honcho and Met board member Anna Wintour—it has increasingly become about ostentatious displays of conspicuous wealth, on one end showcasing which fashion houses' overlords have the dough to drop on the $350,000 tables for their creative directors and their guests, and on the other, a social (and philanthropic?) ticket for less style-inclined moneybags (and invited City officials, who get free tickets should they choose to attend) to rub elbows with celebrities and the fashion elite. Plebes and non-invitees gawking from home have often glided by that last part—it's a fundraiser!—and indulged in the spectacle, which is often fun and gorgeous and also sometimes looks like basura. But to quote the artist and activist Ricardo Gamboa, "To be seduced by the Gala while Gaza burns and immigrants endure bare life in detention centers is a moral failure. It…exposes spectacle as a political technology deployed precisely in this moment, when genocide rages and fascism burgeons, to capture attention and redirect it towards opulence."
The activist group Everyone Hates Elon's weekslong campaign to raise awareness and protest the Amazon overlord embedding himself into what is, at its core, a museum fundraiser for a section of the Met that preserves and protects historical garments, ended on a high note the night before the Gala, when the activists blasted a projection of Amazon staffers and slogans like "NO RED CARPET FOR TRUMP’S BILLIONAIRES" on the facade of his five-floor penthouse on Fifth Avenue (cost: around $119 million). The group's actions leading up to the Gala included a poster campaign across bus stops and subways, parody commemorative plates in the Met’s gift shop, and a grip of hidden water bottles filled with fake urine to symbolize the lack of bathroom breaks for Amazon workers, like an Easter egg hunt of piss for the disgustingly rich.
