(MET) TECH Gala: Life Imitates Art

 

I’m not a fan of the The Devil Wears Prada franchise, I enjoyed the second film more than the first. I feel something similar about the MET Gala. I’m not a fan, but I don’t miss a single detail. After this latest event, it became clear that something changed, and not for the better.

The most obvious sign was the sponsorship. Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men on the planet and owner of Amazon, decided to put his money into the Super Bowl of fashion in the United States. The question many asked was legitimate: what is Bezos doing here? What does the owner of Amazon have to do with high fashion? With a museum, with culture, with aesthetic narratives?

The answer came when I remembered the movie. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, Emily convinces her husband, a tech billionaire, to buy the magazine Runway, run by Miranda Priestly. In real life, Bezos tried to buy Vogue for his partner, Lauren Sánchez. The problem was that the magazine wasn’t sold on its own, it came bundled with GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Wired, and other publications from the same publishing group, Condé Nast. Bezos didn’t want the full package. I suppose the trip to space with Katy Perry wasn’t enough compensation, so he chose something else: buying the Super Bowl of fashion. You don’t get into the MET Gala without acceptance, invitation, or validation. Bezos BOUGHT them. Someone many see as a symbol of inequality, precarity, and extreme capitalism bought for himself and his wife the role of cultural curator. An image washing effort so crude it’s hard to ignore.

Economic power sponsoring cultural events is nothing new or scandalous. Kings were patrons of artists for centuries, and in return they received works that amplified their image: sculptures, paintings, palaces, songs, poems. What’s unusual is that while previous sponsors simply sponsored, full stop, this time it was different. The role of Lauren Sánchez was so prominent that I would dare say this MET Gala was bought for her to be in the spotlight, sorry, Anna Wintour.

Protests didn’t take long to appear, and for good reason. While artists walked the carpet, labor demonstrations unfolded in the streets. It’s said that bottles of fake urine appeared inside the museum as a form of protest. The reason is no small matter: workers in Amazon warehouses have publicly denounced not being allowed bathroom breaks during their shifts, forcing them to urinate in bottles at their workstations.

There’s more. Bezos silenced all criticism of Donald Trump in his newspaper, The Washington Post, and even accompanied him at his inauguration. Amazon provides technological support to agencies like ICE to help locate undocumented individuals in the United States. It’s striking, to say the least, that all of this is happening while Bezos’s wife carries the last name Sánchez.

In the movie, Andy Sachs and her fellow journalists are fired via a mass email. It’s not such a distant image from what recently happened at The Washington Post, nor from what thousands of employees in tech companies have experienced in recent years.

What Bezos wants is clear: expand his empire. And he knows he can’t compete with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg on their own turf. His domain is selling, like Emily in the film. The problem is that companies like Alibaba, Shein, and Temu are closing in, offering goods at prices that are nearly impossible to match. That’s why it’s no surprise that Bezos has his eyes on Bernard Arnault of Louis Vuitton and Amancio Ortega of Inditex. It’s no surprise he wants to get into the fashion world. It’s no surprise the theme of this MET Gala was “Fashion Is Art.” It’s also no surprise that many highly anticipated figures declined the invitation, that most designs ignored the theme or appeared in black as a form of protest. And of course, it’s no surprise to see the debut of a Zara design reimagined by John Galliano. Bezos’s model is Zara. It won’t be long before Amazon uses artificial intelligence to try to dominate the fashion world and dictate trends through online sales.

The night’s biggest loser was Anna Wintour. The legendary editor of Vogue was reduced to a supporting role next to Sánchez. We’re no longer talking about sponsorships, we’re talking about something more serious: the power to decide what is fashion, what is trend, and what is art.

And here’s where honesty matters: fashion is not art. Haute couture isn’t either, not on its own. Just as the films of Jean Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar are enriched by incorporating references to architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music, and dance, haute couture grows when it does the same. It feeds on art, takes it as reference, but it is not art in itself. Claiming that fashion is art is an attempt to deceive, to hide that an entire industry is under threat. The choice of black as the dominant color of the night was no accident. Black as a funeral color against the usual palette. A signal that something isn’t right.

There was, however, a flash of brilliance. The big winner of this MET Gala was designer Robert Wun, whose work stole the event without apparent effort. What Wun does isn’t fashion, it’s haute couture. Under different circumstances, we should be celebrating him. Even the protest by Sarah Paulson wearing Matières Fécales fell short artistically.

The MET Gala lost something last night that it won’t easily recover. It nearly felt like Sánchez might step out to offer cake to the protesters in the street. Even Beyoncé, absent from these events for a decade, had to be brought in to restore some of the shine of previous years. If Jay-Z is brought in by the ultra conservative owners of the NFL to add “inclusivity” to the Super Bowl, someone had the “brilliant” idea to include Beyoncé here.

At least in The Devil Wears Prada 2, technofeudalism didn’t win.

If only life imitated art a little more.