Why Did Everything At The Met Gala Feel So Boring?
It came maybe one or two A-listers in, maybe even three. As the stars shimmied onto the green carpet of this year’s garden-themed Met Gala, there seemed to be a lack of sartorial apathy in the air. A simmering indifference to the stream of barely-there ‘naked’ dresses or foliage-adorned frocks that shimmied their way up the hallowed steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A smattering of the 400 guests looked nice, and almost all of them embraced the theme in one way or another. But the takeaway of the evening’s overall efforts was one that nodded towards a sort of stylistic stalemate. Why did all of the looks feel so boring? Like somehow we'd seen them all before?
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Take Kim Kardashian, the architect of modern fame, one of the tenets of which is headline-making, attention-grabbing red carpet ensembles. She’s the entrepreneur who built a billion-dollar brand on her ability to carve a space in the zeitgeist specifically for her unique brand of ubiquity, yet gone are the days when it feels like Kardashian manages to truly shock or inspire us with her sartorial red-carpet options. The same goes for her half sisters, Kylie and Kendall Jenner, both of whom looked perfectly lovely but whose get-ups felt entirely predictable, like we'd seen them before (in many ways, given that the latter wore archival Givenchy by Alexander McQueen, we have indeed 'seen it before').
The Maison Margiela chainmail gown Kardashian wore to this year's Met Gala, which came complete with yet another problematically small corset and cardigan (yes, really), is a prime example of how predictable – and therein forgettable – red carpets have become. The Skims co-founder looked pretty enough, but the outfit will be resigned to the annals of our collective memory before the day is up. Perhaps as a symptom of cultural amnesia or the rapid speed of social media news, very little in today's red carpet repertoire seems memorable enough to immortalise itself.
The antidote to red carpet apathy has emerged as embracing the polar opposite of stylistic monotony. For the press tour for Luca Guadagnino's tennis drama Challengers, Zendaya used every one of her appearances to dress either as or akin to a tennis ball, before opting for a trio of theatrical John Galliano ensembles to make her return to the Met Gala this year after a five-year hiatus. She has spoken about embracing 'themed' dressing with her stylist, Law Roach. In order to stir up some sort of emotion among audiences elsewhere, there was Doja Cat, who last year attended the Met Gala as a cat and engaged in interviews exclusively by meowing, before this year leaving her hotel in a white towel before appearing on the steps of the Met in a dripping wet Vetements T-shirt. The polarisation is clear – either dress forgettably or as a towel or a tennis ball.
Either way, the red carpet is seemingly tired and somehow we've seen it all before. The ubiquity of headlines and celebrities and their outfits means that the opportunity to walk in front of the cameras needs to feel like a departure from the ordinary, it needs an injection of fresh blood and energy that's far removed from the gatekeepers who all adhere to the same rulebook.
In order for the red carpet to be interesting, audiences have to care. And in order for audiences to care, there has to be something different to see. Once all of the headlines have been grabbed by the towels and the tennis balls, what is there left to see that we haven't already? Sadly, in a world of people whose attention is firmly in the palms of social media companies, there is a constant deluge of conversation-starting things happening in a virtual realm that, rightly or wrongly, foster a sense of community. Everyday on social media is a red carpet event for influencers and their followers, so why should anybody care about whatever the 1% are doing on a red carpet faraway from wherever they are? Red carpets are losing their cache, and in order for the stars that grace them to continue to have moments of relevance, it's time red carpets found themselves again – and fast.
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