A Fancy Dress Party for the 1%.

Billy Porter - What - this old thing?

You may or may not have heard of the Met Gala.  Even if you have you may not know that this nick name is actually an annual fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.  It is held every year on the first Monday of May (yes on a school night).  It is very exclusive and the biggest event on New York’s social calendar.  Feel like popping along?  That will cost you about $35,000 per ticket.  Your outfit for the night, plus five-star accommodation, limos, hair dresser, make-up will take the cost up to…well, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

The other thing to know is that it isn’t just a case of buying a new frock, shoes and evening clutch.  There’s a theme to dress to every year so really it is really an upmarket fancy dress party.  Sometimes they honour a particular designer (in 2011 they honoured the late Alexander McQueen, giving everyone an excuse to rock up in their favourite Alexander McQueen piece).  More recently though they have upped the ante and given guests a concept to dress to.  In 2015, it was China:  Through the Looking Glass (remembered for Rihanna’s gown with a massive yellow train).  In 2016 was Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology so the order of the day was metallics (especially silver), asymmetry and Beyonce wore pleather.  Last year it was Heavenly Bodies:  Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.  Queue dresses with stars and crucifixes and many halo headdresses and Rihanna wore a Bishop’s hat.  The theme for 2017 was difficult because it was honouring Rei Kawakubo who was behind the label Comme de Garcons which doesn’t really do evening wear and if it does it is usually the sort of thing that makes people ask "why are you wearing haberdashery?".  So everyone gave up and wore some pretty evening gowns.  But that’s the thing with the Met Gala – unlike the Oscars Red Carpet, it isn’t about elegance.  It is about fashion (or should that be farshion, darling) and so wearing stuff that makes people say “who would actually wear that?” is de riguer.  It is the Costume Institute – emphasis on the word costume.

This year was Camp:  Notes on Fashion.  One would think every year at the Met Gala is kind of camp so this year would be easy but surprisingly some people got it wrong.  “Camp” means lots of colour and shiny things with the all important element of pizazz, with a wink to the audience because you are all in the joke – think Liberace, dance numbers in musicals, showgirls at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, Berlin cabaret, Freddie Mercury, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Frank Thring, Peter Allen, the movies of Baz Luhrmann (to paraphrase Charlie Pickering, Australia is the campest nation on earth). Over-the-top but in the best possible taste.  Your mission should you have the funds to pay for it, would be to find a dress with sequins and feathers and do not wear black (unless you are Frank Thring) or neutrals.  And here is my list of those who got it right, who missed the point and who didn’t even try and who wore a nice frock best.

A Standing Ovation for: 

(photos from The Guardian and Vogue) 

The Jenners.  I don't know which one is which

Middle-aged Celine Dion is oddly suited to couture

Katy Perry.  Because there is no light fitting
 as camp as a chandelier

Billy Porter Makes His Entrance

Ciara

Michael Urie

Natasha Lyonne

I shouldn't need to explain why Joan Collins is here

Winnie Harlow

Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Hunter

Janet Hock

Polite round of applause for:

70s Disco is the grandchild of camp

Nice pirate earrings but black Harry?

 

Try Hard Awards to:

Ezra Miller - surrealism, yes.  Camp? No

Jared Leto - Gothic Horror?  Yes.  Camp? No

(Photo: Time Magazine)
Earnest performance art is still earnest performance art even if you're wearing shocking pink.

A nightie Gwyneth?

  

This is confusng avant-garde with camp.

Didn’t Try:  Frank Ocean, Kanye West.  Maybe they thought it meant camp as in the great outdoors and that’s why they wore comfortable black pullovers.  The Olsen twins - maybe one year the theme will be “The Witching Hour” and suddenly they’ll be on trend because as one wit on Twitter said “one of them looks like they know how you die, and the other knows when…"

Best Dressed in stuff you might actually wear: 

Kate Moss

Katie Holmes

Ruth Wilson

Rosie Huntington-Whitley

Taylor Hill