How the $75,000-a-ticket Met Gala became more about money and less about fashion

Wintour, who seems happy having certain celebrities dress as fools in order to encourage clicks, orchestrated Sanchez’s perfectly fine Oscar de la Renta gown for the evening, thus ensuring she would be seen as a viable fashion person. Why? According to New York Magazine, she’s keen on the idea of Sanchez’s husband-to-be, Jeff Bezos, acquiring Condé Nast. 

Entry to the Met equals entry to the fashion world, which then turns on the money tap. Brands will court you to become one of their ambassadors. If you’re one already, their data retrieval programmes will trawl the internet to measure how many times your photograph is used by media outlets to check their Return on Investment.

It’s not just actors and musicians who stand to benefit. Make-up and hair artists shill the products they use to prep their clients on Instagram in the hope of a contract. And boy are there plenty of products (Kim Kardashian told US Vogue that she’d spent 14 hours just getting her hair dyed blonde for the 2022 Met Gala). One veteran of several Mets tells me it would take her two days solid to get ready, “and that was back in the day, before it got this crazy. And I’m not even a celebrity. By the time you’ve started with the eyebrow microblading, progressed through the fake tanning, the $3000 facials to actual hair and make up, it’s a solid 48 hours.”