The Met Gala is a Status Economy
And this year, I refused to participate.
What does the Met Gala have in common with the UN General Assembly? More than either would like to admit…
I’ll come back to that. But let’s start here:
I boycotted the Met Gala this year.
The reasons, I would hope, are obvious. And yet nothing about this moment feels obvious anymore. Well, with the exception—maybe—of Lauren Sanchez Bezos’ look.
I know what you’re thinking, in the words of Chris Brown (unfortunately), “I don’t see how you can hate outside of the club… You can’t even get in?!” Of course I was not invited to the Gala—the one time I was, it was a deal point in my styling gig for Coach’s primary guest that year. What I mean to say is, I declined to style any clients for the event. I did not attend any after parties, and I tried my best not to cover it at all but, as your resident loud mouth, too much needed to be said.
I have to admit, it was a win-win situation. I can scarcely describe my relief. As I’ve written about before, the Met, for a stylist, is a particular kind of psychic torture: months of negotiations, fittings, politics, the slow erosion of instinct in favor of consensus, asking for favors, bowing to your host designer’s whims while trying to protect your client. It’s a juggling act for even the most seasoned among us (Andrew Mukamal did, like, five people this season). To opt out is to reclaim my own nervous system—to choose peace, not war. But that’s not the only reason why I stayed home.
I stayed home because this year, the illusion cracked beyond repair.
Fashion has always had a talent for laundering. In these moments, it wraps the most sinister individuals in silk, under the warm glow of flashing lights, and manages to convince us it’s culture. This is not new. But I have my limits. At some point the game-playing and strategy starts to stink of complicity.
This year crossed that line for me.
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE
To be involved in this Met Gala is to answer the call, quite plainly, to celebrate under the patronage of a system that extracts from the very people who make fashion possible. And not abstractly, either. Directly and systemically. That is what Amazon does, it exploits, uses up, and destroys. It’s workers, our society, our planet. That is how Jeff Bezos becomes one of the richest men on earth—and how that wealth circles back to purchase cultural legitimacy.
Because of the abundant condescending conjecture, I would like to state that I understand the need for the Costume Institute to fundraise. I understand the importance of patronage and that not a single museum would exist without the enormous financial contributions of billionaires. I also understand that the fact that these donations are tax write-offs for the one demographic that rarely pays any does not negate the value of their philanthropy. But let’s not be purposely obtuse.
I guess what has unsettled me most is not the event itself, but the ease with which so many found language to justify participation.
They’ll say it’s just work.
They’ll say they committed before they knew.
They’ll say it’s important to be there. Representation is progress. Visibility is everything.
I can’t tell you how much I hate when people use the language of liberation fraudulently to absolve themselves of their own guilt about participating in oppression. I understand why one would—it is a convenient and clean excuse. I just don’t buy it.
Because there is a difference between being seen and being used.
There is a difference between occupying space and legitimizing it. And there is certainly a difference between participation and endorsement, though fashion has grown very comfortable pretending otherwise.
The convenient narrative right now is that having unwavering moral clarity is rigidity, that refusing to engage is naïve. To many a pseudo-intellectual, to hold a line is to fail some imagined test of our ability to engage with nuance.
Gimme a break.
We do not have to meet fascists where they are. We do not have to come to the table. If anything, the table is the problem. Can we lose it already?
This idea—that proximity to power is inherently meaningful—is one of fashion’s most persistent delusions. It is what keeps people orbiting systems that would discard them without hesitation, and what makes an invitation to a party feel like validation instead of what it actually is: gameplay.
And it is a particularly difficult delusion to confront when the cost of refusal is not theoretical for many.
For me, at least, saying no this year meant saying no to styling a dream client.
That is not a small thing to me—it is the very future I’ve been working toward. This person represents the very possibility I have spent years fighting to carve out space for: a fat Black femme occupying one of the most visible stages in fashion, not as an exception to the rule but as someone who dug their heels in, and clawed their way to claiming a stake in a business built to beat us into submission. This year’s dress code, after all, was “Fashion is Art,” and the exhibition leaned into the glorious diversity of the body itself. The show included fat mannequins, mannequins in wheelchairs, fashion designed for different sizes and shape. To walk away from that—from her, and from the chance to contribute to that visibility—was painful in a way that is difficult to explain without sounding contradictory.
Because it is contradictory.
There really are no clean answers to the questions this all poses: what does representation mean when the structure you are being invited to represent yourself within is itself causing harm? At what point does visibility stop being a form of progress and start functioning as a form of cover?
I do not take lightly the fact that I have argued, publicly and persistently, for more bodies like my would-be client’s to exist in those rooms. Which is precisely why the decision mattered. Because if our presence can be mobilized to soften critique, to shield from criticism, to signal progress where there is none, to make something fundamentally exploitative appear inclusive, then the work has been misused.
Lest we forget, no one is paid (per se) to attend the Met Gala.
And while that fact is often treated as evidence of its prestige—as though the absence of payment elevates the exchange— in reality, it clarifies what is actually happening.
There is no labor-for-compensation here. This is a status economy.
Your presence earns you alignment to the establishment.
And I say that candidly as someone who has, at times, benefited from that alignment.
You are offering your image, your cultural capital, and your proximity, in service of an institution that will never feel the need to pay you because the currency it deals in is access.
To go to the Met proves you have arrived.
It is for this very reason that the question of participation carries real weight. When you attend, you are not simply showing up to a party. You are lending yourself to the construction of a story about what matters and who matters.
Plus, in my experience, fashion is very good at teaching you that acceptance is conditional. It teaches you that proximity is earned through usefulness, that the closer you get to the center, the more you are expected to contort in order to remain there. Over time, this becomes internalized. You begin to anticipate the compromises before they are even asked of you. You begin to understand your own value in terms of how effectively you can move within the system without disrupting it.
So why go?
“I hate to say this, and I hope I don’t sound ridiculous, but…” it’s for the image. It’s for the documentation of belonging.
I can’t stop thinking about the marginalized people placed on host committees, positioned as evidence of progress. I think about the way their presence is mobilized. I don’t like these folks being used as human shields—their bodies becoming a kind of armor for someone else’s reputation.
I keep thinking of Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the UN being repeatedly deployed over the last three years to cast the U.S. vetoes against ceasefire in Gaza, and most of the other heinous actions our country has taken in that assembly. Different arena, same maneuver: marginalized bodies front the decision, absorb the blowback, and lend moral cover to outcomes they did not author or control.
If you are on the committee and understand this about your role, it’s painful.
If you don’t, it’s by design.
And both outcomes make me very sad.
Because while I love that there was an entire section of the exhibition focused on disabled bodies, upon which Sinéad Burke’s groundbreaking disability advocacy consulting group Tilting the Lens advised, and that the radiant and all-around iconic Aariana Rose Philip—a revolutionary model, artist, and earth angel—was invited to attend (only for the cocktails, I am told), it kills me that the only pictures we have of her are from the ground floor because they did not build a ramp for her to ascend the famed stairs like everyone else.
Despite the fact that her wheelchair-bound body was photographed by Vogue to celebrate the diversity of the human body in this show.
Maybe I am splitting hairs, and I would sooner die than strip any magic from this moment from either of these women. The labor they have done and the boundaries they broke last night are important. But I resent the implication that their contributions are legitimized by what happens on those steps. Because we know that fashion is not made by making it to the Met.
Fashion, at its best, is not a trickle-down system. It does not originate in the highest C-suites, and penthouses and filter into the street. It rises from the people.
Which is why, this year, I chose a different ball.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Earlier yesterday, with Lisa Ann Walter, I co-hosted the Ball Without Billionaires, an event thrown by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest labor union representing US, Canadian, and Puerto Rican members. The event was the balm we needed, and the only place that made sense to me yesterday. It was grounded in the idea that Labor is Art, and sought to demonstrate that labor is not adjacent to culture, but foundational to it. The premise was simple but really is radical when you think about it: the people whose work sustains our economy are the ones who define our culture and deserve to be celebrated.
It was incredible to see learn fist hand about the incredible organizing being done by workers from across our economy (many of them came specifically from Amazon warehouses), and watch them walk the runway. Not as gimmicks, but as the true stakeholders that they are. As organizers, resistance leaders, and everyday working people. They spoke about unmeetable quotas that push them to their bodily limits for bare minimum wages.
I was shocked to learn that while the average Amazon employee makes around $17 an hour, Jeff Bezos makes approximately $8 million an hour—for reference, he bought the Met Gala for a measly $10 million.
They described their organizing in terms of survival, not moral high ground. They told stories of injury, of retaliation, of exhaustion… it was almost unimaginable to think the man responsible for treating his employees so reprehensibly was having the red carpet rolled out for him a few blocks uptown. The walkers in the Ball Without Billionaires exposed the human cost of making someone so rich that they can buy the Met Gala and that is something I will NEVER be able to square.
What became clear to me, almost immediately, is that there is no abstraction in a conversation about exploitation when the people experiencing it are standing directly in front of you.
There was something transformative in bearing witness to this testimony—hearing stories of triumph and solidarity threaded through the horror of working for a company that treats its warehouse employees as expendable, as modern-day slaves. I’m grateful to have been even a small part of the reclamation of power that unfolded yesterday in the Meatpacking District: vendors sharing their goods, students and laborers moving together, the whole scene held in a kind of collective warmth. And all of it in a place long shaped by workers who fought to organize, and by queer communities who built lives—and safety—among one another. I felt a real sense of community at this ball. I can tell you plainly: it wasn’t happening anywhere else on the first Monday in May.
So I ask again: if the Met Gala is meant to be a reflection of our cultural values, then we have to ask, honestly, what those values are.
Who gets celebrated, protected, erased?
And more importantly, who gets to decide?
At our ball, at least, that answer felt right for once.
No one needed permission to be there. No one needed to justify their worth. No one mistook proximity to wealth for power. And no one was willing to pretend that submission to punishing systems will ever serve them more than banding together and fighting back.
And while resistance is not an easy position to hold—standing up for what’s right rarely is, and there is always a cost to stepping outside of a system that rewards compliance so handsomely—there is also a cost to staying inside of it.
And it’s hefty… and cumulative.
For me, it showed up first as discomfort, then as dissonance, and eventually it calcified into something much harder to ignore: the realization that I was participating in the very thing I claimed to critique.
I’m not interested in that kind of contradiction anymore.
So no, I wasn’t at the Met Gala this year.
I was somewhere else.
Somewhere where the people who make the world run were treated, briefly, like they actually do just that. Somewhere where we knew all of our struggles are connected, and that there is no progress without the solidarity and power of the people.
So before you post your carpet photos, the ones you took while former Amazon Union leader and activist Chris Smalls was putting his body on the line to protect the people that your host exploits and abuses every day, remember that just last year this same worker and activist was detained and assaulted by Israeli forces after the aid flotilla he was aboard, Handala, was intercepted by the IOF before it could deliver supplies to Gaza. And understand what participation signals to the people whose labor—and lives—make that spectacle possible. From Amazon warehouses to war zones. From Dilley Detention Center to aid distribution sites for a population under genocide. It says you can’t count on us. We’ll sell you out for a party picture.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, don’t say “Free Palestine.” Don’t say, “Fuck Ice.” Don’t say, “Eat the Rich.”
Say, “I knew. And I went anyway.”
You concisely summarized the points I tried to make to my sweet fashion ignorant husband last night, thank you!
It's always disappointing when marginalized people are forced to be the bravest, not by choice, but circumstance. Art and patronage are an ugly ouroboros, but that does not mean artists and consumers of art can just abjure our personal responsibility when it comes to how we interact with these spaces.
Instead of watching the red carpet and analyzing every look in my fashion babe group chat, I went to an art class. It felt like a small way of reclaiming power.
Scorched my eyebrows off, thank you for this incisive analysis!