How do you divide the spectacle?

A video from Met Gala creator Hayley Kalil has been viewed more than 15 million times. It starts with a close-up of her face as she lip-syncs to an excerpt from Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ – ‘Let them eat cake’, followed by the beginning of Le Tigre’s ‘Deceptacon’. The camera pans out to reveal her entire outfit, an elaborate floral dress and headpiece. She looks like Marie Antoinette rolling around in fondant cake flowers. Behind her, hordes of normals stand behind barricades hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity at fashion’s biggest night of the year.

The dress code for this year’s Met Gala was “The Garden of Time,” a reference to a 1962 short story by JG Ballard about a Count and Countess who live in a lavish villa surrounded by a wall. Within the wall, in the garden of time, “the air seemed clearer, the sun warmer, while the plain was always dull and remote.” Every day the Count gazes at the horizon to assess the progress of a huge army “consisting of an enormous crowd of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganized tide” towards his property . .

The Count picks ‘time flowers’ from the garden, glass roses that shrink in his hand and eventually melt like an ice cube. Every time he does that, the crowd retreats. Time has returned and his way of life remains for another day or two.

To me, this is a story about fear: “They both knew it was time the garden was dying.” The Count and his wife take a walk through the garden every evening, trying not to count the remaining flowers, commenting on how many are left, as if trying to comfort themselves.

The Met Gala is always a night for statements about image, celebrity identity, and fashion as art, and I like to think of it as an indicator of where the culture is and where it’s going. Who is invited, who chooses not to attend, who goes with whom, how the outfits are covered – it all feeds into this celebrity machine that serves as a cipher for the broader culture. I usually click through slideshows of the best-dressed celebrities the next morning, but on Monday night I was home alone and decided to tune in Vogues livestream of the gala entrances. One of the most fascinating and successful interpretations of the Met Gala theme came from Tyla, who wore a sand sculpture dress from Balmain. She was wearing an hourglass clutch and there were also sand marks on her shoulders. The garment was beautiful, impossible to walk in and short-lived. As a work of art dealing with a creative theme, it is a masterpiece. But as I watched her being hoisted up the steps of the Met by strong men, I couldn’t help but think of the photos and videos I’ve seen of Gaza children, covered in sand and dust, screaming in the rubble.

For the past seven months, my social media feeds have been filled with unimaginable horrors. Every day I see a desperate plea from Palestinians to help, to witness and to end the relentless bloodshed. Every day I see new numbers quantifying the catastrophic loss of life on the other side of the world. And I’ve continued to work, make my little podcast, eat meals, go to the gym, and even laugh. I’ve seen twenty-one movies this year. I have read thirteen books. I have made plans to move to another city. I’ve slept.

It seems that the fundamental condition of modernity is that we learn to separate horrific truths about the world from the everyday demands of existence within capitalism. Over the past decade I have seen and discussed countless tragedies, unprecedented events and horrors that have left me thinking:This is the worst it has ever been.” And somehow it gets worse. Nazis march proudly through a college town, cheered on by the president. My mother narrowly misses a mass shooting at a supermarket she frequents. Apocalyptic forest fires consume the Amazon. The White House fires tear gas at protesters. A global pandemic is killing millions of people.

Israel is bombing Rafah and I’m shopping for bras while on the phone with my boyfriend. It’s frustrating because I’m looking for an ethically made bra, but I’m annoyed because the one I want comes from a fast fashion retailer, disguised as luxury basics, that advertises on a podcast I listen to. My friend says to me, ‘You’re so good at that. I just accepted that everything I do is part of a harmful system.” And she’s not wrong. It sometimes feels like an impossible game of endless trade-offs that never seem to be enough.

Nowhere is this felt more in our endless scrolling through our feeds, a place already burdened with anxiety. How could it not? We were never meant to see so much, hear so much, peek into the bedrooms of so many strangers with the ease and randomness of a swipe across a glass screen.

A child has lost her limbs, a cow has given birth, a teenager has finished chemo, a cat is enjoying her last cleaning, those viral dress pants are being restocked on TikTok shop, and she is “looking for a man in the financial world with a trust fund, 6 feet tall, blue eyes.”

And in early May, nothing consumes the feeds and timelines like the Met Gala. The Gala has been a spectacle since the 1970s, when Diana Vreeland was at the helm, transforming what was once an annual benefit for the Met’s Costume Institute into a glamorous and exclusive affair where celebrities and socialites showcase their most outlandish interpretations of the Met’s dress code. give evening.

Since 1995, Anna Wintour has chaired the Gala and continues to immerse herself in the spectacle. Being invited to the Met Gala means you’ve made it into a certain group, and as easy as it is to write the whole thing off as outrageous elites setting money on fire to stroke their own egos, it’s also objectively true that the Gala is a reflection of a certain layer of our culture that will eventually descend on the masses, such as the cerulean monologue of Miranda Priestly (a character modeled on Wintour himself). It’s a place to see fashion as art, to celebrate a certain form of creative expression available only to those swimming in the swirling cesspool of money, fame and power. It’s terrible, and it’s beautiful.

But this cultural message moves up and down the social ladder. This year’s theme felt especially creepy and deliberate, as it seems like our world is sliding further and further into shit, and the opulence of the evening feels like something excessive. The hunger Games. On the morning of the Gala, as celebrities, influencers and others were on call to prepare for their entrances, Israel expanded its attack on Rafah. In New York, just a few subway stops from The Met, Columbia students learned that commencement had been canceled, the latest step by the university administration in their blundering and brutal crackdown on the protests. Two weeks ago, the Condé Union protested outside Wintour’s apartment in support of their fight for a new contract. Wintour even gave a friendly interview to one of the Fashion hosts on the livestream without her signature sunglasses, a courtesy she failed to extend to Condé employees a few months ago when she informed them their jobs would be eliminated.

I wish I knew how to hold all of this inside me at the same time. I recognize a desire in myself to write it all off as indulgent and unimportant, but I can’t. I marvel at my brain’s ability to switch from painful to awe in the time it takes to swipe to the next video. It is necessary to recognize that you cannot live on a diet of tragedy alone. Contentment, no matter how fleeting, can keep you healthy. And yet, every time I find respite, I feel the creeping pull of guilt and sadness. There it is again: another wonder of a dress, another impeccable style choice, another example of creative vision. I disgust myself for watching it, but I also don’t think a life dedicated to justice without art is worth living.

When we imagine ourselves in Ballard’s short story, who are we? I think many of us would like to imagine that we are members of the raging army, resolutely approaching the walled garden of the elite, undeterred by routine setbacks. I’m not sure though. When the flowers are finally gone and the garden is nothing but decapitated glass stems, the army finally scales the walls. But instead of retaliating, they find a dilapidated building forgotten by time. The beautiful lake is now empty and the vines in the garden have overtaken the walls of the building. The Count and Countess are found hidden under overgrown bushes. They have been turned to stone and will remain frozen there for the rest of time, with a final rose in their hands.