The Met Ball (And Why I Will Never Be Invited)

There is such horror in the world at the moment, my brain keeps falling over. I have taken to doom scrolling and anxiety dreams as my way of coping. It’s not an ideal situation if I’m honest, so if you find me curled up like a hedgehog, weeping into my sleeve you will know why.

As an antidote, let’s talk about the Met Ball.

Let’s start with the big question. Why bother having a dress code when 90% of your guests ignore it and just wear what they fancy?

I once went to The Savoy Grill in a top that they considered too low cut. I was told that unless I kept my cardigan on I wouldn’t be allowed to eat my giant Yorkshire pudding in peace. If I hadn’t been so hungry I would have sacked it off, especially because there was no signage suggesting that the flash of the top third of someone’s bosom would cause rioting in the stalls. They just didn’t like the cut of my peasant jib. As it was, I cardiganned up, ate my frankly unimpressive roast dinner and vowed never to return to the halls of overpriced patriarchy and school dinners.

Apparently though, you can turn up to one of the most prestigious balls in the world dressed as a guinea pig, despite the dress code being ‘what my great aunt Fanny wore on holiday in 1932’ and there is no bouncer in the world strong enough to repel you.

Your name’s not down. You’re not coming in.

Is not the motto of the Met Ball.

I love fashion. Love it. I love how ludicrous it is. I love that it takes seventy-five, blind Balinese seamstresses four years to make one sleeve. I love the fact that there is a man who makes fluorescent tweed so you can cycle in plus fours without being mowed down by an articulated lorry in the dark. I love that teeter-totter between art and fashion. This should make the Met Ball one of my must watch spectacles of the season.

But this year I found it troubling for many reasons, not least of which is that while celebrities were cheesing it up on the red carpet the country was attempting to overturn Roe versus Wade and frankly it would have been more appropriate if everyone had donned Handmaid’s garb.

But let’s not allow reality to creep in here too much.

I think the main thing I disliked about this year’s fashions is that so many of them were actually unwearable, and what I saw on the red carpet was a lot of people struggling to contain themselves in clothes that were seemingly never designed for actual people’s bodies.

On a serious note it was a pictorial essay in why so many people suffer with body dysmorphia.

On a less serious note:

There was a lot of hitching, staggering and propping going on, which didn’t look at all comfortable. And I know that fashion isn’t about comfort, but I do think that if you can’t stand still in clothes and you can’t move in clothes and you can’t climb up stairs in clothes and the body the clothes you are wearing was designed for was probably unicycle shaped and not you shaped, then what’s the point?

You might as well just staple beer mats to yourself, or climb inside a septic tank and put braces on it, or nail yourself to a moped. Why actually bother with clothes designers when what they are designing are not always, technically speaking clothes at all?

And no, just pouring glitter on it in the hope that nobody will see the join isn’t going to cut it. It didn’t work when you were in pre-school and it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the whole Marilyn Monroe/Kim Kardashian thing.

I’m not even going to go into the traumatic implications of a dress that is a historical artefact being worn to not eat soup in at a party for clout. Or the fact that the conservators probably had to be given a valium drip for 48 hours to get over the trauma.

Kudos to Kim K for having the nerves of steel to wear a five million dollar dress to a party and not scream at anyone coming within fifty yards of her with any food or drink. The dry cleaning implications are enough to give anyone a nervy b.

I’m sorry though, it totally missed the mark for me.

The dress is iconic because Marilyn Monroe’s was the body that wore it, and what a body. Gloriously imperfect and wildly sexy because of it. She was poured into the dress and she wore the hell out of it. And you could see that she lived in it. She wasn’t a clothes hanger. She occupied proper space in the world for all the tragedy of her life. You knew that body had seen life in all its wonders and horrors and that dress would have a tale to tell.

And Kim K?

She might as well have been wearing a big sheet of paper that said: ‘Don’t you know how important I am?’

And that’s as dull as hell.

Clothes are for living in. For dancing and drinking and fucking in. They’re for climbing trees in and throwing off in wild abandon. They are sexiest when they enhance the life of the person wearing them, not when they are used instead of a life lived.

You need clothes that make you more yourself, not someone else. You’re never sexier than when you are entirely yourself.