On Monday night, the fashion world will gather for the Met Gala, the annual ritual of celebrity opulence that our current social revolution has not yet harpooned. The theme this year is the evolution of American style, an exploration not only of the work of historically significant designers like Charles James and Halston but also of the dressmakers and tailors who toiled in obscurity on their behalf. The egalitarian dabbling would seem to begin and end there, however, given that the party’s dress code this year is “gilded glamour.” Guests, according to Vogue, whose editor Anna Wintour famously presides over the event, have been asked to “embody the grandeur — and perhaps the dichotomy — of Gilded Age New York.”
The period’s relevant “dichotomy,” of course, is that some people lived like the Astors while many more were forced to send their 9-year-olds off to factories from squalid tenements. Come costumed as if you are on your way to Newport; come dressed as an orphan whose destitute parents have just died of cholera. Contradiction.
born as much from obliviousness as it is from greed or power tripping, is the insidious habit of the image-making business. This has been obvious most recently as magazines, advertisers and other marketers of lifestyle have aggressively traded on a sense of social attunement while often keeping to internal practices entirely at odds with any stated commitment to progressive values.
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