maximalism
There’s nothing better, your stargazer thinks, than scrolling through red carpet photos from the Met Gala and reading what people have commented on them.
This year the theme of the gala – the biggest fashion gala in, for sure, the world, hosted by Vogue – was gilded glamor and white tie† Your stargazer had to look up exactly what that meant, and the gilded age by that, the time of industrialization in America, at the end of the nineteenth century. Fashionably that means corsets, dresses with a train, feathers – maximalism, so to speak.
An easy theme in itself, think princess dress, but almost no one had adhered to it. Cara Delevigne came in her bare breasts, painted gold – probably because she was wearing them gilded in the other sense had thought: gilded. Gwen Stefani wore a glowing yellow suit, Bella Hadid came in as dominatrix: nice, but not exactly gilded age.
Billie Eilish was one of the few to take the theme literally, and she was wearing a heavily constricted dress where her breasts, as was customary at the time, bulged out. She looked very uncomfortable. And dressed up. As in: dress up box.
So you see what the older stars have known for a long time: you should never literally stick to the theme, or even not at all, because then it will be a costume party, which is different from a fashion gala.
basic
Met Gala, Part 2. Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress that Monroe wore in the iconic moment she saw in 1962 happy birthday mr. President sang for JF Kennedy. Kardashian borrowed the dress from the museum Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
Again, the dress had nothing to do with industrialization, although Monroe’s, and also Kardashian’s, success was indirectly a result of that period: factories, prosperity, booming showbiz. something like that.
Kardashian got a lot of shit, because she made the historical dress now feel ‘basic’ – raunchy – and why did she shout everywhere that she had to lose 7 kilos in three weeks to fit into the dress? Being cool about crash diets is so 1998.
But if your stargazers may interrupt for a moment in the amusing cry of critics, the whole Met Gala revolves around the history of fashion, and what could be more fun than someone taking the trouble to borrow a dress from a museum? Otherwise that dress would hang in a display case until the end of time, and you only see what a piece of clothing really is when a living person wears it.
A dress like that might suddenly be vulgar, they thought so too in 1962, and incredibly cramped and difficult to move in. That’s fascinating, from a fashion historical point of view, isn’t it?
In addition, Kardashian treated the dress with respect. “I would never sit in it, or eat (…) and I would never wear the body makeup I normally use.” No body makeup! The ultimate concession.