This is a massive cliche, I’ll own, but the Met Gala really is my Super Bowl. I love a maximalist fashion night. I love debating best and worst dressed. I love reminding people that dressing to the theme has never been required and only recently became popular. It’s not Heidi Klum’s Halloween party, after all.¹ I love love love the Met Gala.

But not this year’s. This year’s was utterly floptastic. And it was always doomed—you can’t hide the stench of the Bezos oligarchs, no matter how many florals you send up those stairs—but I didn’t expect it to be so dull. Nearly as dull as the Met Gala in Ocean’s 8, even.²

Maybe we can blame the theme for the dullness. “Fashion As Art” is kind of the entire raison d’être for the Costume Institute, for which the Met Gala is a fundraiser. So as a theme, it’s pretty entry-level. Sometimes a simple theme inspires greatness, though—the 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” Met Gala hosted some of the best looks in the Gala’s history, with several career-best looks from the attendees, and that one was essentially “Catholic Imagery: The Gala.” Simple doesn’t have to be boring. And this is coming from me, noted minimalism skeptic!

So it’s not just the theme. Perhaps the increasingly desperate state of the real world has deflated the Met Gala somewhat. Or perhaps it was the noxious presence of the honorary co-hosts themselves. Because while there were some absolute stunners (Naomi Osaka, my GOD) and some absolute weirdos (Janelle Monae, complimentary; Cardi B, derogatory), there were also four (4) women who came inspired by the exact same painting.

John Singer Sargent’s Madame X is a portrait of socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, and it caused a serious scandal in its day. The original painting depicted one of Gautreau’s jeweled dress straps falling off her shoulder, which was more shocking to polite society in the 1880s than full bush on the catwalk³ is today. It was bad enough that Sargent had to go back and repaint the damn thing so that both straps were on Gautreau’s shoulders.

The scandal has since died down, and Madame X has become a famous enough portrait that it gets referenced a LOT, on screen and on the red carpet. Now, wearing a black gown to the Met Gala is already a low-effort, safe move. Taking inspiration from such a common reference point makes it an even safer move. So none of these women are doing anything particularly risky or out-of-the-ordinary for their style profiles. Claire Foy’s Erdem is the most literal interpretation, which I would expect from someone whose breakout role was Queen Elizabeth II. Julianne Moore looks like herself in the Bottega Veneta, which is to say she’s having a full diva moment from the shoulders down (come on, feather stole!), and then went very severe and understated with the hair and makeup. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is a supermodel with a Burberry contract, so she’s capable of pulling off the trickiest silhouette and most abstract take on the inspo.

And then there’s Lauren Sanchez Bezos.

Now, let me explain something to you. I live for every Schiaparelli show. When Runway’s Nigel talks about fashion designers as “some of the greatest artists of the century…and what they did, what they created, was greater than art. Because you live your life in it.”—that’s how I feel about what Daniel Roseberry is doing at Schiaparelli. Bearing witness to this kind of artistry feels like a gift.

So why does THIS Schiaparelli look like an un-steamed Fashion Nova prom dress?

Why do all of her outfits pull and pucker at the seams? Why is this so BORING? She’s richer that Croesus by obscene orders of magnitude. She’s an honorary host of this event, which is a fashion event. Her stylist is Law Roach, who frequently makes his muse look like art come to life.⁴ There’s genuinely no excuse for any of this. Like, why are you even here, girl??

It feels so emblematic of the entire oligarch mindset we’re dealing with. Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos have enough money that they could fund the Costume Institute in perpetuity, just like they could the Washington Post. If they literally just paid taxes, they’d cover those bills easily. But they don’t want to do that. They don’t want to contribute to society, because contributing comes with accountability and expectations and other such strings. They want to run society, so they don’t have to be beholden to anything or anybody.

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Unfortunately, want begets want. Nothing will be enough. Even running society with zero accountability is not enough. They also want cultural cache. They want people to like and respect them—and not the sycophants and minions who are too dumb or indebted to them to say otherwise, either. They want cool, popular people to like them. It’s not enough for them to rent out Venice for a weekend for their gaudy monstrosity of a wedding. They aren’t satisfied with their own events. They want to be welcomed into the parts of society that make things beautiful and interesting and vibrant. This is happening further downstream, too; MAGAts are not satisfied with having their own social media platforms. TruthSocial isn’t enough. They want to be part of Twitter, and now Threads, because that’s where the motion is. So they keep poisoning every environment that they want to own, while screaming slurs at those of us who created the environments and made them special in the first place.

I love the Met Gala. But I hate that this country refuses to value, and therefore fund, the arts, so places like the Costume Institute have to depend on patronage. I hate that the patrons in question now are the ones who are holding democracy hostage while they tell us we’re too broke to deserve a democracy at all. And I hate that they seem determined to own, and therefore destroy, all the things that make life beautiful in the midst of life becoming unbearable. And they look fucking tacky doing it.