Quite good. Thanks for posting.
J.G. Ballard is an interesting writer. Strange stuff.
I don’t follow fashion, but due to my recent renewed interest in movies, the various film awards shows come into my peripheral vision. These overlap in turn with fashion centric events like the Met Gala and with the awards shows in other entertainment domains (e.g. the various music awards). In today’s world, the big money people who are pulling the strings are looking for synergies and crossovers, and there are a lot of odd appearances. Basically I keep a side eye out for actors that I like to see if they are particularly stunning or, sometimes, to see how badly they’ve humiliated themselves. The big fashion houses sign celebrities to big contracts to moonlight as runway models at these big events, and some of the outfits are truly cringe inducing.
Anyhow, the Met Gala has been off in bizarro world for a long time. It is a fundraiser for a branch of the Metropolitan Museum. Serving as chairman of the annual big dollar fundraising event for a major nonprofit organization is a thankless job. Usually the chairman’s duty consists of sitting with the staff to decide on the general contours and then working one’s rolodex to relentless twist the arms of friends and business associates to write a big check. I’ve done enough political fundraising to respect the people who are willing to take on these jobs and do them well. In many organizations this is the kind of task that gets rotated through the up and coming members as a thankless task that you do to get your ticket punched on the march through the offices. Sometimes, if an organization is lucky, it will find someone who has a knack for the job and who sticks around for a few years.
Without pretending to understand this particular domain, my layman’s sense is that the Met Gala is an outlier (at least in part, but I think it’s a substantial part) because Anna Wintour took it over many years ago and has made it her own. By all accounts, she has turned it into a fundraising juggernaut for the Met. Kudos to her for that.
At some point, however, the Met Gala morphed into becoming The Anna Wintour Invitational. She is who she is. She runs Vogue and is wholly in bed with the big fashion houses. She clearly has an appetite for the outlandish edge of high fashion. She seems to like shocking for the sake of shocking, and there seems to be a standing invitation to the name designers to use the Met Gala as an opportunity to let their freak out. This happens in some of the other fashion shows as well, but those are events organized by the fashion industry itself. The Met Gala, in the final analysis, is run by the Metropolitan Museum — but the Museum has apparently gotten drunk on the money that Anna Wintour raises, and it has let the lunatics take over the asylum.
Decadence
DECADENCE.
Caligula would be worshipped. We know that because all these weirdos worshipped Harvey Weinstein.
BTTT