Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
It’s time! Time for the 2023 Met Gala, or as Chloë Sevigny put it in 2016, time to “Google all the girls in their crazy gowns and judge them all.” Let’s go!
But first, some table setting. This year’s Met Gala was deemed controversial from the moment the theme, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, was first announced. In choosing to honor the legacy of the late Kaiser Karl, “a paradox” of a human as once described by Anna Wintour, some couldn’t dissociate the memory of a man who once called Adele “a little too fat” and declared of the #MeToo movement he was “fed up.”
Lagerfeld, himself, was never one to value reflection, much less regret. “I make an effort not to remember; I don’t have to live in my own dusty past,” Lagerfeld told The Cut in 2018. Still, a great effort was made to keep the exhibition, and by proxy the Gala, focused less on the artist and more on the artist’s stylistic vocabulary. “We didn’t want to emphasize Karl, the man, who has long been the subject of breathless mythologizing, largely the result of his own self-invention,” remarked Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, during a Monday morning press preview.
Despite the absence of mainstays like Blake Lively, the event delivered on being the most significant confluence of our shared celebrity galaxy since, well, CinemaCon, which concluded just days earlier. This to say, barrages of celebrities aren’t exactly red diamonds these days. And sure, we could align with Tom Ford’s thinking that the Gala has devolved into more of a “costume party” than its origins as a midnight supper for New York society. Yet there’s an innate tension between the exclusivity of the Met Gala and the necessity of satisfying the…
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