Met Gala Snooze

It's even worse than you thought.

Most of us can agree that the Met Gala is a tone-deaf extravagance of conspicuous consumption and celebrity vacuity, but what I bet you don’t know is that it is also unremittingly dull. Stultifying. (Hold on, I have to go check the OED for more synonyms because I need more to adequately get across what a snooze-fest it is.) Dull, dreary, monotonous, humdrum, pedestrian, stale, flat, arid, insipid, vapid, leaden, plodding. I could go on.

In 2008, the theme of the Gala and the museum show that accompanied it was Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.

It was inspired by curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Andrew Bolton’s love of my husband Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Bolton asked Michael to write an introductory essay for the museum catalogue. Secret Skin: An Essay in Unitard Theory went on to be published in the New Yorker. He’s reprinted it on his Substack. Enjoy!

Given that Michael was the inspiration for the show and thus the Gala, we assumed we would be invited to the festivities. Silly us. It took a series of phone calls, and the fact that we had met Harold Koda, the Costume Institute’s curator-in-chief through mutual friends and had shared a few lobster dinners in Maine, to finally pry loose an invitation, but eventually there we were, on our way to what NPR has called “an opulent, invite-only, celebrity-filled pop culture spectacle.”

It was all of those things. Invite-only (see above). Opulent for sure. The approximately one zillion dollars worth of clothing that swept up the stairs, the crystal champagne glasses, etc. etc. Even I was pretty damn opulent. I borrowed a diamond pendant that was worth at the time about one hundred thousand dollars.¹ The editor-in-chief of Details Magazine arranged for some fancy designers to send me dresses, but since I couldn’t fit them over my head let alone my boobs, I ended up shopping in the closet of a friend. My dress was lovely, if a few years out of season.² Michael was as handsome and well-dressed as ever in a tux that he didn’t even buy for the occasion. His shirt was was new, a lagniappe from Details.

We took a black car to the event, a luxury that was immediately vitiated by the phone call we received while we were en route informing us that our older son was being suspended from school for the day. That call was the most compelling part of our evening.

The place was crawling with celebrities like rats in a New York subway station. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, David Bowie, Jennifer Lopez, Blake Lively, Katie Holmes, Sofia Coppola, and those are just the names on the first few pages of the Getty Images website. Also, it turns out Donald Trump was there, God help us all. I don’t actually remember seeing any of those people. I remember shaking hands with Julia Roberts and the delightfully petit George Clooney, whose jobs as co-chairs of the evening involved standing at the entrance and shaking everyone’s hands like the parents of the bride at a WASP wedding circa 1955.

Our first inkling of how tiresome the whole thing was doomed to be was when we stood in the museum’s Great Hall in a crush of celebrities, people stomping on the trains of each other’s dresses, and craning over one another’s shoulders, trying to catch a glimpse of celebrities more famous than themselves. I remember being simultaneously disappointed and relieved that these shiny happy people were just as anxiously star-fucker-ish as us plebs.

After approximately 37 hours of milling around and trying to grab one of the hors d’oeuvres that only Michael and I were interested in eating, we were ushered into the banquet hall. I think it was in the Temple of Dendur, but honestly I don’t remember. Recall I said this evening was unremittingly tedious so it’s hardly a surprise that it’s mostly faded from my mind.

We were seated far off to the side, at the staff table, with various museum employees including, I think (can this possibly be true?), Harold Koda himself. The entertainment was the cast of the revival of Hair doing an energetic song and dance number (not, unfortunately, the naked one, which might at least have been moderately amusing). The food was fine, the conversation at our table was probably more interesting than at most of the others; we talked about the Museum rather than whatever famous people talk about with other famous people whom they want to impress. The exhibit was fun for my comic book-obsessed husband. We left early, probably because we wanted some time to yell at our kid before he went to bed.

And that was it. Hardly worth the price and effort of the cross-country plane ticket and the babysitter.

I doubt you are inclined to be jealous of all those famous people fêting Trump acolyte Jeff Bezos and his deliriously happy happy happy wife tonight, but in case you are, I promise you’ll have a much better time lying around your house in your pajamas rewatching Heated Rivalry than any of the guests at “fashion’s biggest night,” where “haute couture intersects with history to create the ultimate cultural moment – all in the name of art.”³

1. I’m not telling you the name of the jeweler who generously lent me the bling because I was supposed to pick it up and drop it off with some attention to security and though I’d intended to take a cab (this was before Uber) I somehow ended up on the subway holding a necklace worth two years of college tuition.

2. I did buy a pair of YSL pumps at full price, which I still have and am loath to wear because Jesus Fucking Christ they were expensive.

3. Thank you wikipedia, for the suitably fatuous description.