Zo Friedman, Staff Writer
Teyana Taylor at the 2025 Met Gala in Ruth E. Carter. Photo source: People’s Magazine
EVERY YEAR on the first Monday of May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosts the Met Gala. It is a grandiose display of exceeding excessive fashion and even more excessive wealth, with its primary purpose to act as a fundraiser for The Costume Institute.
Of course, this is by no means a measly fundraiser; the price of attendance to the event is not only exceptional, but requires a degree of notoriety that only comes with the willingness to flaunt your money—as the celebrities in attendance do. Despite this, the primary issue is not the money. The enormous amounts of money invested in the Met are nothing in comparison to the money Elon Musk and the President of the United States opt not to pay in tax. In digression, what is more troubling about the gala is that it does not particularly seem to focus on accessibility to art or the art itself. Instead, it broadcasts celebrity exclusivity and their wealth. After all, they invite rich people to promote expensive art, so that those able to afford time and tickets can witness that expensive art as a monument of history—which it is of course only a fraction of. And in doing this, the Met Gala enforces narratives that presume that art alone is not enough. Instead, power is what appeals more. This is not just a criticism of the Met—other museums fall into similar traps—but the Met Gala, as aforementioned, widely broadcasts the Met’s seeming supremacy and is often forgiven because it is consistently that way. So as is often the case, this gala represents a larger question of accessibility to representative history/art and education that is supremely relevant to this year’s Met Gala theme.
In the past, the Costume Institute at the Met and its Met Gala themes were embroiled in controversy for offending religious majorities, commemorating vocally disgusting fashion moguls, and misrepresenting marginalized groups. However, in most cases, the Met Gala continues without much dissent and those minor controversies do nothing but incite conversation about the fashion, rather than discussions about the subjects of the controversies.
Last year, the 2024 Met Gala received a much larger degree of criticism due to its timing, coinciding with the still ongoing atrocities in Gaza, Ukraine, and countless other places. The Gala also received criticism for inviting Jeff Bezos, who attended Trump’s recent inauguration—the same Trump who has called upon white supremacist organizations, is the primary cause of the ICE raids throughout the US, and is working to reduce spending on health services and eliminate welfare. This year, the Met Gala has again been criticized with vaguely unsuccessful though relevant calls to boycott the event, stating that its lavishness seems insensitive due to the political turmoil across the globe.
However, the Gala went on as planned, and the dress code “Tailored for You,” as per usual, coincided with the exhibition theme “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which the Met states is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity and “present[s] a cultural and historical examination of the Black dandy, from the figure’s emergence in Enlightenment Europe during the 18th century to [the] 21st-century.” This theme specifically dwells on the use of creativity as resistance to colonial presentations of elitism and highlights the power dynamics of presentation in general. In an interview with CBC, Charmaine Gooden, the founder of Black Fashion Canada, explains that dandyism interprets colonial fashion structures to suit Black bodies.
As such, many celebrities attended wearing lesser-known Black designers, notably Jenna Ortega in a Balmain dress made of rulers and Teyana Taylor in Ruth E. Carter wearing a red and black pinstriped suit. However, the majority of attendees wore clothing designed by large and well-known conglomerates, as is often the case at this Gala, including Anna Wintour, the chairperson of the Met Gala, in Louis Vuitton.
Reception of the Gala was mixed, and garnered some confusion after Wintour was quoted rambling aimlessly when asked about the use of fashion as allyship. Some even went so far as to conclude that themes are frankly useless if few attendees—perhaps not even the chair of the Met Gala—care to educate themselves about the work that they are representing. If the Met had mandated the dress code be less vague and more in line with black dandyism, then they may have bypassed some of the issues of accessibility to under-represented history, as the Met Gala is a platform which—due to the sheer scale of fiscal power in attendance and its media buzz—attracts international attention. Instead, the complicated politics of the Met Gala and its tendency to somewhat ignore the history it attempts to occupy continue. It seems there will be no end to its exhibition of fashion and political oligarchy, which is positioned against creative institutions such as itself.
Recently, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk until his very public divorce from the president, has been targeting funds allocated to museums, libraries, and other public service sectors that make education and the arts accessible. The Center on Budget and Policy Reform explains that if DOGE succeeds in eliminating such services or at least detrimentally reduces their budgets, “families across the country, particularly in small, rural, and low-income communities, will experience the resulting harm for years to come.” Trump’s DOGE has already successfully fired necessary governmental employees in the Department of Education and departments responsible for accessible healthcare in the States. The Wall Street Journal explains that the efforts DOGE is making to reduce federal spending and increase efficiency are shockingly not accomplishing what they set out to and that they have saved a marginal fraction of what they promised; a fraction that would so easily be covered if Elon Musk were to pay the taxes he owes.
It is clear that the Trump administration does not hesitate to carelessly cut federal spending in sectors that are objectively necessary, such as healthcare and education. As a result, it would be faulty to presume that they would not do the same to museums, such as the Met, which asked the government in 2020 for four million dollars and thereafter received said sum in 2021.
All of this information is not to disqualify the Met’s validity as a museum, but rather to point out its inadequacy in completing the goals which it sets out to perform, in similar ways to DOGE. The Met Gala’s theme this year was a perfect opportunity to do as art should, which is to represent, and though on some individual fronts it did, the Gala still occupied themselves with fiscal goals, rather than on the exhibition itself. The Met saturated the carpet with designer brands that associate with an administration that is not only racist, but also has no respect for the work of museums. The Met should reconsider its position, as it still has the platform to do so.
