Is the theme of this year’s Met Gala ironically prophetic?
Social media seems to be flooded with celebrities flaunting their extravagant outfits and accessories from this year's Met Gala, popularly regarded as the world's most glamorous fashion event and an annual fundraising event for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York, US. The theme this year was "Garden of Time," and with a little digging, it is easy to see how the theme is counterproductive to the so-called "prestige" of the event.
The Garden of Time is the title of a short speculative fiction written by JG Ballard, a British author of dystopian literature. The protagonists of the story (or perhaps it would be best to call them anti-heroes?), Count Axel and his unnamed wife, are filthy rich, dressed in finery and bedazzled in precious gems and metals. They live idly in a fancy villa and have a garden that has magical flowers, with "opaque outer petals enclosing a crystal heart." The "light trapped within the core" would be emitted once plucked from its glass-like, transparent stem. These are time-slowing flowers that Count Axel plucks out in order to slow down a working class "army" that is getting closer to their mansion, in an attempt to besiege the estate. The garden is dying though, and it is easy to deduce that Count Axel exploits nature in the sense that he keeps picking out the mystical flowers for his selfish, materialistic motives, just as the wealthiest (Met Gala invitees included) do the most damage to the environment in today's world.
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Ballard himself compares the "approaching horde" with a Goya painting. Francisco Goya was an important Spanish artist whose works included grotesque scenes from upheavals and wars: "a vast confused throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganised tide. Some laboured under heavy loads suspended from crude yokes around their necks; others struggled with cumbersome wooden carts, their hands wrenching at the wheel spokes; a few trudged on alone; but all moved on at the same pace, bowed backs illuminated in the fleeting sun."
After the last flowers are plucked, we can assume that the "ceaseless tide of humanity" will break in and there will be a class conflict/rebellion that will end in the annihilation of aristocracy. If I am being honest, I expected a French Revolution-eque, gory ending, but the writer was kinder to the protagonists because the story culminates with a rather cold imagery of the count and countess being turned into stone—almost as if the time-slowing flowers kept them and therefore their titles/nobility alive. I cannot help but draw up a Medusa reference here—it is almost as if the wrath of the wronged Gorgon is the driving force of the angry mob that eventually goes up against the embodiments of the evil system that creates a stratified society.
If we are to draw parallels between the Met Gala and the story which inspired this year's theme, how sickening is it to realise that the rich celebrities in their themed costumes are in a sense "protected," just as Count Axel and his wife were safeguarded? It is almost as if their opulent outfits and ritzy jewels, which even the celebrities themselves cannot own (they cost an arm and a leg or are archival pieces and are therefore "borrowed" from designers' vaults), put them high up on a pedestal—one that the masses can never reach—which in turn grants those superstars with exclusivity and an inaccessible, cult-like membership. Ballard's story is ironically fitting because the rioting mob's sentiments can be found in the general masses' social anger towards hedonistic elites today, who indulge in excesses, in the face of abject poverty, genocide, gender apartheid, and many other forms of societal ills that plague the world—a world that is no less dystopian than Ballard's fictional realm.
Will the growing inequalities in this nightmarish reality tip the scales and cause mass outrage, leading to a world where moderation becomes the motto? Will there be a literal and figurative "tide," as Ballard put it, which will take humankind forward by paradoxically backtracking into a world of anti-capitalism? Is the theme of this year's Met Gala ironically prophetic then? That the extremes of wealth will eventually cease to exist and be brought to naught, just as the embodiments of nobility were turned to stone in Ballard's story? Well, even if the organisers knew that this would get people talking, perhaps I myself have fallen into the trap of hyping up the Met Gala, despite criticising it, because bad publicity is publicity nonetheless, at least in the consumerist, capitalistic world we find ourselves in.
Noora Shamsi Bahar is senior lecturer at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University (NSU), and a published researcher and translator.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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