By David Kittredge
By David Kittredge
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, otherwise known as The Met, held their over-the-top, festering, flamboyant fashion show “The Met Gala” a few days ago.
Fashionistas and their ilk don’t normally garner my attention, but while perusing the Google News headlines my attention was piqued when reading that a single ticket to attend the gala now costs $30,000 per ticket. Back in the mid-’90s a ticket to the show cost a mere $1,000, which shows an insane increase in price even when accounting for inflation.
Even if you can afford the $30,000 ticket price that does not mean you can just attend. You must be an invitee. Those invited would include the aforementioned fashionistas and the privileged opulent of our American society, all of whom can be bundled into the category of the beautiful people.
In further explanation, many of the tickets are often bought up by corporations and are then handed out to the guest celebrities.
The red carpet is rolled out for the rich and famous — or infamous perhaps, depending on one’s personal point of view. This idea of rolling out the red carpet harkens back some 2,500 years in ancient Greece in the Aeschylus play “Agamemnon, when the King’s vengeful wife, Clytemnestra, lays the “crimson path” for him upon his arrival back from the Trojan War.
The themes of these Met Gala fashion shows are on the outer limits of the spectrum of design and art where it seems they have jumped the rainbow into the Land of Oz as the participants dress in costumes reminiscent of the Munchkins, who led Dorothy down the yellow brick road. One fellow this year was dressed in what looked to be a golden lampshade, perhaps symbolic of his “seeing the light.” Kim made the scene, enshrouded from head to foot in black gauze, reminiscent of an Egyptian mummy attending a funeral. A.O.C. ironically dressed as a human billboard proclaiming “Tax the Rich” painted in blood red letters. The message seemed a tad hypocritical for an avowed socialist by the fact that she accepted a $30,000 ticket to attend in the first place, thus initializing a strange dichotomy of political stratagems and greed. This stance of socialism for thee, but not for me, heralds the birth pangs of an oligarchy, where a chosen few control the government and the wealth of a country, while the general public become feudal tax slaves supporting the beautiful royalty.
As I gaze on the spectacle, while the celebs make spectacles of themselves, I am reminded of the 1969 song, “Tennessee Bird Walk.”
“Oh, remember my darling / When spring is in the air / And the bald-headed birds / Are whisp’ring ev’rywhere / You can see them walking / Southward in their dirty underwear / That’s the Tennessee Bird walk.”
Now some might think this to be a bit of an exaggeration, but one woman this year, Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon, while traipsing across the red carpet and peacocking for the cameras, had the audacity to raise her arm above her head to proudly show off her unshaven glops of armpit hair. Did we really need to be apprised of this fact? Lourdes is also quite proud of the size and the total studliness of her impaled tongue as she showed it off like an overexerted bloodhound.
Très chic.
David Kittredge is a regular contributor to the Eagle Times. You can send comments to him via the editor.
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