Bezos Bash

The beginning of May heralds many celebrations. May Day, Early Bank Holiday, spring finally rearing its head (as much as it can in English weather, anyway). Yet perhaps the most prominent event for netizens and socialites alike is the Met Gala, a fundraiser and fashion event held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first Monday of May. This year, the 4^th of May saw celebrities strut across a garden-like carpet dressed in reference to this year’s theme: ‘Fashion is Art’. The exhibition inside must have delighted the 450 guests of this year’s Gala with its 200 sculptures and accompanying garments that displayed the dressing of the marginalised body in fashion.

What conveys marginalised bodies more than charging $100,000 per head at an event sponsored by Jeff and Lauren Bezos? What says more about art, fashion and the struggle of dressing the underrepresented body than a luxury tulle dress with a dollar bill over the eyes, to represent the blindness of the 1%? Or a suggestive commentary on AI, astronauts (or maybe fencing) in a white Stella McCartney dress, mesh mask and six-fingered gloves? Perhaps I didn’t understand the message fully. 

After all, Anna Wintour, former editor in chief for Vogue, present CCO at its parent company Condé Nast, didn’t seem to be concerned. Despite a flurry of rumours last year that Bezos had planned to buy Condé Nast as a wedding gift for his wife, she has assured us that Lauren Sánchez-Bezos, honorary chair, would be a 'wonderful asset'. That’s a relief. Sánchez-Bezos herself emulated Sargent’s Madame X (1883) in a custom Schiaparelli dress, with a jewelled strap falling over the shoulder to represent the 'scandal' of the original painting. Though I wonder how scandalous one can be in a custom-made dress from a luxury brand, I’m sure such thoughts were considered in the crafting process.

Just outside of the MET, similar concerns were coming into the light. A 'Resistance Red Carpet' was in full swing: a fashion show of union workers, doormen, Amazon workers and tech workers from February’s mass layoffs at Bezos’s own The Washington Post. Manhattan seemed to have been gripped in an anti-Bezos fervour in the past few weeks, spearheaded by British activist group ‘Everybody Hates Elon’ and their provocative posters that reminded passerbys of Amazon’s close working relationship with ICE. The Friday before the Gala saw 300 bottles of fake urine placed tastefully across the museum, most likely in reference to the complaints of Amazon workers in Manesar, India in 2024, who were unable to take bathroom breaks until they met their sales quotas. One day before the Gala, projections of interviews with Amazon workers were seen in high definition on the facades of the Bezos’s Madison Square Park penthouse, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

The Gala this year – and every year – was held in celebration of art, fashion, and the endless creativity and labour that dresses the body, especially one that is underrepresented. Having the Bezos’ chair the event after a history of inhumane working conditions and innumerable redundancies is baffling at least; even before they funnelled money into POTUS’s inauguration fund, financially backed the making of Melania Trump’s documentary, or supported an administration which reduced grants for the National Endowment for the Arts.

In a city where 1 in 4 people live in poverty, such revelations do not take long to achieve. I am not the first, nor the last, to be incensed over this event; Manhattan’s workers have made it abundantly clear that a celebration of art cannot exist without a celebration of labour, that art does not exist without the efforts of the working class to create it.

Yet, I do wonder what next year’s Met Gala will look like. Will Jeff Bezos’s plan come to fruition, and will Condé Nast be the next media company to be in his grasp? Will the theme next year be literary references, and will Sánchez-Bezos delight us all in a provocative outfit à la Napoleon from Animal Farm? What’s for certain is that resistance a few streets down from the MET will continue, especially if the arts continue to be moulded into a shape that resembles the dreams of billionaires. But perhaps we’ll only remember once the outfits begin to appear on our feeds again in a year.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/SWinxy

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