It is billed as the Oscars of the fashion world. The annual red carpet Met Ball takes place on the first Monday in May inside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (though on the strength of the photos here, it should be renamed the Metropolitan Museum of A**e), hosted by American Vogue’s global editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour.
It is meant to be a showcase for creativity. It is meant to demonstrate how the fashion industry really is a great art form, which these days is wholly inclusive of different shapes, races, genders and ages. Its purpose is to raise funds, ostensibly from its $350,000 (£279,000) per table-of-ten ticket sales, for the museum’s work (though I do wonder whether the biggest stars stump up a bean) and to that end, sets its invitees a different theme each year on which to base their outfits.
This time, it was florals. What’s not to love and linger over?
And yet this year’s frocks, and the bodies shoehorned into them, have in one fell swoop managed to set the cause of responsible, female-friendly fashion back by more than 100 years.
Rapper Doja Cat left little to the imagination as she left a Met Gala after-party
Shakira wore a barely-there dress with thigh-high boots for a Met Gala after-party on Monday
Actress Sydney Sweeney was equally revealing as she posed before the Met Gala
I am talking about the rubber-stamping by powerful stars of the belief that a woman has to be naked in order to be noticed. That the kind of publicity that actresses, models and talented individuals need and want can only be attained through self-exposure of the most literal kind.
Despite the price tags, the garments worn by many of those who strode the red carpet on Monday night – all by the most expensive couturiers in the world – weren’t made to enhance, support, disguise, empower or improve. They were mere wisps, a smoke screen that proclaimed to the world the wearer’s Olympian hours in the gym, or her cosmetic surgeon’s prowess. They did not show women at their most beautiful or creative, but how little they ate, or how supernaturally young they were.
Here was Jennifer Lopez, in silver Schiaparelli made up of 2.5million beads and really nothing else. Her legs, buttocks and much else besides were almost entirely exposed. The Met Ball was entitled The Garden of Time, but it should have been The Garden Where Time Stood Still. At 54, isn’t Lopez at an age where she might want to take her foot off the pedal?
Jennifer Lopez’s legs, buttocks and more besides were exposed in a silver Schiaparelli dress made of 2.5million beads and not much else, writes Liz Jones
Rita Ora’s Marni tabard exposed just about everything
Emily Ratajkowski’s sheer cobweb gown by Versace made her the sum of her lady parts…
… while Elle Fanning’s Balmain creation made her look like a piece of meat in clingfilm
Singer Rita Ora, 33, was another offender. She wore a Marni tabard exposing not just side boob but side everything. One commentator noted her outfit resembled the beaded curtain at the back of a dodgy mobile phone repair shop. It covered almost nothing.
Spying model Emily Ratajkowski in a cobweb gown by Versace, the whole of her breasts and buttocks clearly visible, made me reverse my opinion of her as a woman who has stood up for herself against the male gaze. I’d always admired the 32-year-old for battling the male photographers who own and profit from images of her body and thought of her as a woman who actually has a brain (she wrote a well-received book, My Body, in 2022). But now, instead, I can only think of her as weak, a morose victim, the sum only of her lady parts.
Even worse for me was the young film star Elle Fanning, 26, in a gown by Balmain. I’m sorry to say she reminded me of a piece of meat encased in clingfilm: pink flesh about to be consumed by the tyranny of youth, fame and notoriety. Everything was sheer, see-through — not even peep-hole but blatantly exhibited.
These women have careers, fame, money and fans, so I wonder, scrolling the parade of pubic bones, what makes them go out dressed like this? Not one looks joyous or comfortable. (The only wide beams on the night were from women who dressed more demurely: Kylie, in bargain basement Diesel, and actress Ayo Edebiri, in Loewe.) Instead, to my mind, these young stars looked the reverse – dark-eyed, solemn, unhappy, frozen by the flashlights that would capture everything they had to offer and lay it all out as online clickbait within minutes.
Donatella Versace, who ‘dressed’ Ratajkowksi, is a woman, remember, so let’s not have as our thesis that it’s gay, male designers treating us like plastic mannequins. Neither are these women cowed by pushy stylists who need publicity to fuel their careers.
So why, after the decade of MeToo, after the focus on shattering the equal pay ceiling in Hollywood, do the most powerful, beautiful women in the world want so willingly, wantonly to humiliate themselves?
Dame Anna Wintour showed real power by choosing a demure coat dress by Jonathan Anderson of Loewe, writes Liz Jones
Real power, of course, is not giving in to passing fads or to social media pressure, a truism seen by the hostess of this flesh fest, Dame Anna Wintour, 74, who chose to wear a demure coat dress by Jonathan Anderson of Loewe. You could imagine her eye-rolling at all these silly, easily-swayed flibbertigibbets.
There were plenty of corsets on show too, that old-school method of female subjugation. Pop star Ariana Grande was tied up tight in virginal white ribbons, while singer Dua Lipa’s black lace number was pure Victoria’s Secret, worn with matching tights that barely covered a half of her behind.
Dua Lipa’s black lace number was pure Victoria’s Secret
Cardi B needed no fewer than five helpers to arrange her black lace gown around her ready for this red-carpet pose
Model Gigi Hadid, meanwhile, was in a Thom Browne frock with so many ruffles and flounces that she could barely walk
Others could hardly move. I almost laughed when I watched pop star Cardi B attempting to pose for a photo: she needed no fewer than five red carpet fluffers to arrange the folds of her black lace gown around her. Model Gigi Hadid was in a Thom Browne frock with so many ruffles and flounces, she could barely walk. Rather than these women being out for the evening, loud and proud, strong and sassy, they were hobbled, like invalids in a care home. Shuffling like beached whales, though nowhere a hint of any blubber.
This particular silhouette is far more unattainable than the waif of the Nineties, which could be aped merely by not taking on board food and water. No, this silhouette requires hard cash. As the former beauty editor Ellen Atlanta notes in her new book, Pixel Flesh, the likes of Kardashian and Kendall Jenner (who on Monday night wore Nineties Givenchy) are part of a digital culture that drives a £500billion global beauty industry. Butt-lift surgery causes one death per 4,000 operations. Nearly a million Botox injections are bought in the UK each year. In my day, I would flick through Vogue once a month. Now? Girls are clicking on airbrushed photos, thousands of times a day.
Kendall Jenner repeated her no-pants look from last year’s Met Gala in 1999 Givenchy Couture
It wasn’t just the women who looked ridiculous… Norwegian salmon fishing billionaire Gustav Magnar Witzoe’s chiffon gown had to be held by helpers
A minority of men looked daft, too, notably Norwegian salmon fishing billionaire Gustav Magnar Witzoe in, appropriately, salmon-coloured chiffon. How handsome and superior was Jude Law, in a classic tux, in comparison. But it was mostly the women who came across as utterly desperate.
And I think I know what drives these women. And it is the age-old fear — of not being seen, of ageing, of being unloved, of becoming irrelevant.
Where are the stars who will be brave enough to buck this trend? Fame and success, on the evidence of Monday night, is no longer, sadly, about a woman’s body of work. It is solely about her body.
